Which is a better solution for our non-English speaking

students?

1Susana PintoSpring 2010

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RESEARCH DESIGN

• Nonequivalent Control Group Design:Two groups are pretested, exposed to a treatment (x), and post tested (o).

• Symbolic design: – O X1 O– O X2 O

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Threats to Internal ValidityHistory: During allotted time there may be distractions, i.e. weather, phone in classroom, fire

drills, etc.

Maturation: Students over time may lose interest or may be embarrassed to be in the group and not pay attention.

Testing/Pre-test Sensitization: Students can expect what will be on the post-test since there will be a pre-test to asses the students.

Instrumentation: Students might get bored of taking the surveys or parents might not fully understand what is being asked.

Mortality: Students might be absent or move away.

Differential Selection of Subjects: Each group is in a different school. One group will be given material in their native language and the other group will only be given English material.

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Threats to External Validity• Ecological Validity: The results of this study can be generalized

with other students that are facing the same language barrier.

• Selection Treatment Interaction: Students were not randomly selected. Both groups were selected because they are learning to read the English language.

• Multiple Treatment: The researcher is using two treatments, immersion / bilingual lesson plans.

• Experimenter Effects: Researcher does present a threat due to the fact that they have a personal connection with the topic.

• Reactive Arrangements/Participants Effects: This could possibly be a threat to the study because since this is new for the students they will do better than on ordinary circumstances, i.e. Novelty Effect.

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Proposed Data Survey Results

Scores

1 – Never read to my child in English

50 %1 – Never read to my child in English

60%

1 – Never read to my child in English

50%

4 – Read to my child 3 times or more

100%

2 – Read to my child once a week

75%4 – Read to my child 3 times or more

90%

1 – Never read to my child in English

65%

A question that was given to parents on a survey:

• How often do you read to your child in English?

• Pre-Test to each student in both groups - G:\WHAT AM I WORKSHEET.doc

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Pre-test & Parental Survey ResultsDo parents reading to their child in English help literacy skills?

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Proposed Data Analysis & Correlation

From the previous Bar Graph we can see that the more a parent reads to their child in English the higher the pre-test score is. This is a good indication that immersing the student in English language has higher benefits than bi-lingual instruction.

Also, our correlation chart shows a high positive correlation. The Rxy is 0.94.

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References

O’Connor – Petruso, S.,(2008)Stat.scales.analyses.threats.design.ppt.

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