UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies professor Alison Bailey has been appointed to a new consensus committee of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine that will examine research on the teaching and learning of science, technology, engineering and mathematics with pre-K through 12th grade English learners.
“With the demands placed on oral and written communication skills by recent academic content standards in mathematics and the sciences, including computer science, the need to understand the relationships between language development and STEM disciplines has perhaps never been greater,” says Bailey. “We will explore what we are asking of all students, and, more pertinently for this committee’s main focus, what we ask of students who must learn STEM content at the same time they are expected to learn English as a new language.”
Bailey’s fellow committee members will include scholars of mathematics, science and engineering education, educational linguistics and reading, as well as practitioners working with English learners and their teachers from the STEM disciplines. Their study, “Supporting English Learners in STEM Subjects,” is funded by the National Science Foundation and includes a report to be published by the National Academies in late 2018. The report will examine the role of language in learning STEM subjects, describe successful programs and interventions, and consider the professional development of STEM teachers who are teaching students who are English learners.
“Key outcomes of this consensus committee will be to evaluate and synthesize for a broad audience the literature and current promising practices for supporting pre-K-through 12th grade English learners’ STEM education, as well as identify gaps where further understanding and/or capacity needs to be built in the areas of learning, teaching and assessing STEM disciplines,” notes Bailey.
Bailey is a co-editor of a new volume, “Language, Literacy, and Learning in the STEM Disciplines: How Language Counts for English Learners,” with colleagues Carolyn Maher, a mathematics education professor at Rutgers University, and Louise Wilkinson, an educational linguistics professor at Syracuse University, to be published in February 2018.
At UCLA, Bailey’s research and teaching interests include children’s first and second language acquisition, early literacy development, academic language pedagogy, language and cognitive development, bilingualism, atypical language development and narrative analysis.
The National Academies are private, nonprofit institutions that provide expert advice on some of the most pressing challenges facing the nation and the world. Their work helps shape sound policies, inform public opinion and advance the pursuit of science, engineering and medicine.
