Rider 82 Curriculum
2007 Pilot Report Findings
Dr. Lesley Tomaszewski and Genny Reid
February 27, 2008
Future Research
The research question guiding this pilot was by using the industry-related curricula can students in NRS levels 2 and 3 learn English and obtain background knowledge on each industry cluster? As mentioned in the discussion question, the answer to this research question would be ‘yes’.
However, there some questions that arise from this data set that could warrant further exploration. These questions include:
- Why was there so much variability across teaching time for each module?
- Why did only one pilot site complete all the lessons in all the modules?
Besides these lingering questions, another area of further exploration could include obtaining additional data from the five pilot sites. The data collected from this study did not include: 1) correlations between contact hours and levels gained by the students piloting and 2) specific information regarding the students, such as levels of prior schooling, language proficiency in the native language, levels of literacy in the native language.
Perhaps accessing TEAMS data and finding correlations between contact hours and levels gained by the students in the pilot programs might be beneficial. However, only one pilot site completed all of the lessons in all of the modules, so the findings from this correlation would be not accurately reflect what is causing student gains (if any).
As mentioned above, specific information regarding the students was not collected by the TCALL research team. On the Texas A&M University Institutional Review Board proposal for this study, the research team agreed that the students participating in this study would be anonymous. To protect their identities, personal questions, such as their name or demographic information were not asked. Perhaps accessing the pilot sites TEAMS data would answer some of these questions, which the TCALL research staff cannot answer. These questions include:
- Years of residence in the U.S.
- Gender
- Age
- Current and previous ccupations
- Years of education in native country
- Time spent outside the classroom in workplace related activities
Also, many of the administrators and teachers mentioned that they felt there was increased student retention. Perhaps it might be beneficial to see if there was an increase in student retention during the pilot can be documented. This data was not collected by the TCALL research staff. However, it will be difficult to determine exactly what caused the increase in student retention (if any) without speaking directly to each one of the students.
Other questions remain that were not asked by the TCALL research staff, but might be answered by the pilot programs. Those include the number of years of classroom experience for each pilot teacher and how the teachers assessed that their students understood the material.
