A dedicated crew of parents from various schools have been meeting to insure the continued strength of the language programs within magnet schools among varous Pgh Public Schools.
A resource listing that gives research as to why this type of studies is so effective can be sent to you via email if you notify me.
Time will tell what the next boss of the school district plans to do.
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Cooper, T. C. (1987). Foreign Language Study and SAT-Verbal Scores. The Modern Language Journal, 71/4, 381-387.
Data from the College Board’s Admission Testing Program revealed that SAT-verbal scores of students who had taken four or five years of any other subject. A large-scale study conducted by Eddy in 1981 concluded that students who study foreign languages for longer periods of time did better on various SAT sub-tests and on the test as a whole that students who studied less foreign language, even when the variable of verbal giftedness was controlled. Cooper’s own study of 23 metropolitan high schools in the southeast revealed that students who take a foreign language in high school scored significantly higher on the verbal portion of the SAT than those who do not. Economic background, which was measured by the number of students receiving free and reduced lunches, did not affect students’ performance. Even those who came from lower socio-economic backgrounds, but took foreign language, performed "basically just as well as their more fortunate peers."
Saunders, C. M. (1998). The Effect of the Study of a Foreign Language in the Elementary School on Scores on the Iowa Test Of Basic Skills and an Analysis of Student-participant Attitudes and Abilities. Unpublished dissertation, University of Georgia.
Saunders specifically examined the performance of third grade students enrolled in the Georgia Elementary School Foreign Language Model Program. She compared students who had not received any foreign language instruction with students one year younger who had received four years of instruction, five days each week, for thirty minutes per day. She found those students in the ESFL program scored significantly higher on the Math portion of the ITBS than the older students had scored. They also performed better on the Reading portion, but the difference was not statistically significant.
Armstrong, P. W. and J. D. Rogers. (1997). Basic Skills Revisited: The Effects of Foreign Language Instruction on Reading, Math and Language Arts. Learning Languages, Spring, 20-31.
This carefully constructed study demonstrated that third graders who were taught Spanish for thirty minutes, three times per week showed statistically significant gains in their Metropolitan Achievement Test scores in the areas of math and language after only one semester of study. This study verifies two earlier studies that showed that foreign language instruction either had no detrimental effect on basic sills or a positive effect on students’ achievement in basic skill areas. The results of this study are particularly interesting since one class of students in the experimental group had actually received one-and-one-half fewer hours of math instruction per week, yet still outperformed the students in the control classes in math.
Samuels, D. D. and R. J. Griffore (1979). The Plattsburgh French Language Immersion Program: Its Influence on Intelligence and Self-esteem. Language Learning, 29/1, 45-52.
Comparison of a group of students who participated in a French Immersion program for one year to a group of students who were enrolled in a regular classroom revealed that the first graders who learned French showed significant gains in measures of performance I.Q. The students in the immersion program performed better on test items that asked them to interpret and organize a series of seemingly unrelated objects. Study of an unfamiliar language appears to sharpen this skill.
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