Flawed Bilingual Research - Brief Article

School Administrator, Feb, 1998

A new study at the University of California-Riverside suggests the length of time it takes non-English-speaking children to become fluent in English has been seriously underestimated by flawed research.

The study by Douglas Mitchell of the California Educational Research Cooperative evaluated the English language development programs in the Santa Ana, Calif., schools. It claimed the research was based on the wrong statistical techniques for estimation.

Mitchell likened the statistical error to averaging the time of the first 100 finishers of the Boston Marathon to conclude this is the average time it takes to run the race. "It becomes easy to erroneously conclude that the thousands of other runners are unmotivated, performing inadequately or have bad training programs," he said.

Copies of the report are available from Mitchell (909-787-3026 or douglas.mitchell@ucr.edu).