Week 4 discussions

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School

National University College *

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ITI660

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Communications

Date

Jun 26, 2024

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docx

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3

Uploaded by CountDragonfly3408

What constitutes Academic Achievement in American Schools today? How would you explain the construct of Academic Achievement Gap? Academic Achievement is the extent to which a student or institution has achieved either short or long term educational goals.Today students academic achievement is measured by standardized tests and placed in categories such as standard exceeded, standard met, standard nearly met and standard not met. Although there is a huge debate on whether or not standardized testing is reliable,it is the main method of measuring student learning and achievement. While these tests provide information on how well students reach benchmarks it disregards other external factors and only views how students perform on a test. Susan Ansell (2011) describes the academic achievement gap as the disparity of academic performance between groups of students. She also states that the biggest argument in the way we currently measure academic achievement is that standardized tests do not provide equitable opportunity for all students to depict their academic achievement. The academic achievement gap refers to the gap between Hispanic and African American students opposed to White and Asian students. The achievement gap is seen greater amongst the population of students showing lower performance on test scores as well as those who come from lower income families and those who are well off. Due to all these low performing factors, federal and state laws have shifted pedagogy and brought more of a focus on equity into the classroom. What constitutes Opportunity to Learn (OTL)? Opportunity to learn focuses more on equity than test based accountability. Opportunity to learn pushes for accountability and includes the quality of resources, school conditions, curriculum, and teaching that students experience. Often leading to asking whether students can be successful in the learning environment they are provided. OTL is different from academic achievement because this answers whether or not students were successful and not given the opportunity to be successful. How would you explain the construct of Opportunity Gap? When talking about opportunity gaps it refers to the circumstances that students cannot control, which include race, socioeconomic status, language, etc. Opportunity gaps determine students' opportunities in the educational system rather than all students having the chance to achieve their potential. This can be seen in the lack of resources the schools may have. Some schools may not have enough funds to provide steam labs, computer labs or science labs. These are gaps that we may see in lower income communities and overwhelmingly affect EL’s.
What is the difference between Academic Achievement Gap and Opportunity Gap? How do these relate to the opportunities for schooling success for English Language Learners in K12 schools? The difference between academic achievement gap and opportunity gap is that academic achievement gap deals with unequal or inequitable distribution of results in grades, testing and other measures of success while opportunity gap deals with the unequal and inequitable distribution of resources and opportunities for students. When referring to EL’s and academic achievement and opportunity to learn, an educator must have an equitable classroom where appropriate scaffolding is implemented to address the students needs. When scaffolding is in place it gives the students to learn content and given methods for assessment in which students can successfully demonstrate academic knowledge. Fenner (2014) describes this idea by stating that EL’s “must also be taught academic language they will need in addition to vocabulary so they can access the content of instruction and acquire academic language simultaneously.” (Fenner, 2014, p. 156) Your own question - something you are wondering about or are unclear about that you would like to share at the end of this Discussion Board so other classmates or instructor may address. One of the questions I have is, In a secondary school setting, where do teachers have the time to collaborate with other teachers to discuss ways to help ELL students and their outcomes? Knowing that students will be transitioning to different teachers with different styles of teaching. How would the students receive the extra language support that they need to succeed aside from meeting with an ESL teacher and the site team? We understand that EL’s need support from all angles, and they need academic language in addition to vocabulary amongst other content areas. According to Fenner (2014), teachers need to appropriately scaffold their instructions for EL’s providing “just right” type and amount of support for each student needs p. 149. With CCSS in place all students are required to work with complex texts, therefore all teachers share the responsibility to teach content and academic language, p. 152. The main goal would be to support EL's to be successful in their academic growth and language development, so that they can meaningfully participate in content-rich lessons along with other students. Reference
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