Project Activities
The project team developed Language Muse (originally called Text Adaptor) into a teacher professional development tool that included a linguistic feedback component for exploring linguistic variability in reading materials and authoring modules for teachers to develop a complete lesson plan associated with related activities to teach text content and related language skills. The team conducted several feasibility and implementation studies and iteratively improved Language Muse to improve usability and add features requested by teachers, such as the ability to upload rubrics, activities, and assessments developed outside the system.
Structured Abstract
Setting
The teacher professional development component was tested with in-service teachers enrolled in certificate-granting courses at Stanford and George Washington Universities and pre-service alternative certification teachers at Georgia State University.
Sample
The studies were conducted with 3 cohorts of teachers. These initial cohorts contain 69 teachers: 28 from Stanford, 19 from GWU, and 22 from GSU. All teachers from the GSU site were preservice teachers. This means that teachers in this program were learning how to be teachers and did not currently hold teaching positions. Some had student teaching experience. The teachers in the Stanford and GWU cohorts held teaching positions in elementary, middle, and high schools. Teachers had a range of teaching experience from less than a year of teaching experience to as much as 37 years of teaching experience. Teachers taught in a range of content areas, including social studies, science, math, language arts, music, art, computers, physical education, and health.
The intervention consists of two components. The first component consists of curricular materials presented to in-service teachers enrolled in teacher professional development courses aimed at improving their ability to provide instruction to ELL students. The second component is a software package that assists teachers in adapting materials for ELLs.
Research design and methods
The research team used a pre/post research design with three cohorts of teachers in training. The team collected a variety of measures at the start of the teacher professional development course and then conducted a within-subjects comparison at the end of the course to measure changes in knowledge, behavior, and attitudes. Following an iterative design process each year, the research team revised and improved the content of the teacher professional development and software technology.
Key measures
Key measures include: teachers' knowledge of course-related content (e.g., awareness of which linguistic features make comprehension more difficult); skills at adapting text for ELLs using the software tools; attitudes and perceptions of the full teacher professional development package; and ratings of the lesson plans developed by teachers.
Data analytic strategy
Researchers conducted an evaluation of the relationship between lesson plan scores and a qualitative analysis of teachers’ inclusion of TEA-Tool linguistic feedback in developing instructional scaffolding for the lesson plan assignment
Key outcomes
- The Language Muse system, comprised of Teacher Professional Development and Instructional Authoring components, was developed and piloted.
- Several feasibility and implementation studies demonstrated that the Language Muse Teacher Professional Development package can be successfully implemented in the context of in-service, post-secondary course work (Burstein et al 2012).
People and institutions involved
IES program contact(s)
Products and publications
Products: Two products were developed in this project. The first was an updated web-based software package, Language Muse, which assists teachers in adapting materials for their ELL students. The second product was appropriate course content for in-service teachers designed to help teachers use the software package and improve their ability to provide instruction to ELLs.
Book chapter
Burstein, J., Sabatini, J., and Shore, J. (2014). Developing NLP Applications for Educational Problem Spaces. In R. Mitkov (Ed.), Oxford Handbook of Computational Linguistics.
Proceeding
Burstein, J., Sabatini, J., Shore, J., Moulder, B., and Lentini, J. (2013). A User Study: Technology to Increase Teachers' Linguistic Awareness to Improve Instructional Language Support for English Language Learners. In Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop of Natural Language Processing for Improving Textual Accessibility (NLP4ITA) (pp. 1-10). Atlanta, GA: Association for Computational Linguistics.
Journal article
Burstein, J., Shore, J., Sabatini, J., Moulder, B., Holtzman, S., & Pedersen, T. (2012). The “Language Muses” System: Linguistically Focused Instructional Authoring. ETS Research Report Series, 2012(2), i-36.
Burstein, J., Shore, J., Sabatini, J., Moulder, B., Lentini, J., Biggers, K., & Holtzman, S. (2014). From Teacher Professional Development to the Classroom: How NLP Technology Can Enhance Teachers' Linguistic Awareness to Support Curriculum Development for English Language Learners. Journal of Educational Computing Research, 51(1), 119-144.
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