Assessment of Transfer in a Bilingual Cooperative Learning Curriculum

Although existing standardized language proficiency tests can provide reliable information on students’ language arts skills, they fail to provide information on how students develop those skills. In this study of third- and fourth-grade bilingual classrooms, CRESST researchers sought to better understand the link between curriculum and language development. Investigating implementation of a bilingual adaptation of the Cooperative Integrated Reading and Composition curriculum, the researchers analyzed differences in students pre- and posttest performance, focusing on changes in English performance during the school year. The researchers found that increased performance could be attributed to classroom discussions of strategies to answer questions consistent with the curriculum model. “Our results,” said Richard Durán and Margaret Szymanski, “suggest the value of studying how assessments of bilingual students’ literacy skills might be tied to students’ awareness of performance standards.”