Supporting Underrepresented and English Language Learning Students:

English-language learning (ELL) students, Latinos, Native Americans, blacks, and other minority student groups continue to be underrepresented in high school science classrooms, science-related majors in universities, and science-related careers in the U.S. The Fossil Finders Project aims to develop these students’ capacities to learn science at the middle-school level by actively engaging them in doing science, rather than learning about science. By providing students with an authentic context for participating in the activities of science, the Fossil Finders project seeks to motivate students to learn. In addition, the project aims to engage underrepresented and ELL students in science by encouraging teachers to adopt instructionally congruent practice in their classrooms.

Adaptations to instructionally congruent strategies for ELL students developed by Luykx and Lee (2007) extend instructional support to underrepresented students in science learning through the Fossil Finders curriculum. These adapted instructional strategies include:

• Integrating cultural experiences and materials from everyday life into instruction
• Inviting the use of native, home, and everyday language during instruction
• Scaffolding instruction for English language development, vocabulary development, and building literacy skills
• Sharing scientific authority through the use of inquiry and explicit instruction in the nature of science (NOS), or the framework guiding science and its assumptions.

Whereas classrooms engaged in the Fossil Finders project will differ from one another, teachers involved in the project will be encouraged to adopt and adapt instructional strategies along the lines of these principles. Each lesson plan of the Fossil Finders curriculum includes suggestions for instructionally congruent practices that may be implemented in relation to the lesson plan. Examples of these practices are further described below.