A comparative study of achievement test scores between bilingually instructed and nonbilingually instructed Cherokee Indian students.

Abstract

A controlled number of linguistically deprived Cherokee Indian children living in rural northeastern Oklahoma Indian communities have receive bilingual instruction through the Cherokee Bilingual Education Program. This instruction has been continuous for periods varying from two to five years depending on the project school. There has been a need for a study that would determine if Cherokee Indian students who received bilingual instruction improved significantly in specific academic areas after an intermediate period of time as compared to a comparable group of Cherokee Indian students who did not received bilingual instruction.

The analysis of covariance was selected as the primary statistical technique, since it allowed one to test for mean differences between the groups with respect to relevant variables. The seven dependent variables used in the analysis were age, sex, I.Q., grade point average, speaker of Cherokee, degree of Indian blood, and father's educational level. The two independent variables used in this study were reading and mathematics achievement mean scores.

The subjects selected for this study were divided into two treatment groups and one control group. The seventeen subjects in the first treatment group were Cherokee Indian students who received bilingual instruction through the Cherokee Bilingual Education Program for five consecutive years. The eighteen subjects in the second treatment group were Cherokee Indian students who had received bilingual instruction through the Cherokee Bilingual Education Program for four consecutive years. The subjects in the two treatment groups comprised nearly one hundred percent of the population who participated in the Cherokee Bilingual Education Program for four or five consecutive years. The eighteen subjects in the control group consisted of comparable Cherokee Indian students who had not received bilingual instruction.

The conclusion derived from this study was that the linguistically deprived Cherokee Indian students need to receive bilingual instruction in order to improve their reading and mathematics achievement. It was also concluded that four consecutive years of bilingual instruction is as effective with linguistically deprived Cherokee Indian children as five consecutive years of bilingual instruction.

The results of the analysis revealed that both treatment groups made significant gains over the control group in reading and mathematics achievement at the .05 level of confidence. A comparison of the adjusted mean scores indicated that there was no significant difference at the .05 level of confidence between the two treatment groups in reading and mathematics achievement.

The purpose of this study was to determine if the eighth grade reading and mathematics achievement scores of Cherokee Indian students who received bilingual instruction in grades one through five were significantly different from the eighth grade reading and mathematics achievement scores of comparable eighth grade Cherokee Indian students who did not receive bilingual instruction. A secondary purpose of this study was to determine whether the eighth grade reading and mathematics achievement scores of five-year bilingual education participants were significantly different from the reading and mathematics achievement scores of four-year bilingual education participants.