Dr. Penny Collins Connects Research and Application to Inform National and International Educational Practices
Irvine, Calif., June 1, 2008
Penny Collins (formerly Chiappe) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Education at the University of California, Irvine. With her training as a cognitive psychologist, her research focuses on the development of reading skills for children from linguistically diverse backgrounds and the early identification of children at-risk for reading difficulties. Recently, her research has been examining if instructional practices that are effective for native English speakers are also effective for elementary and middle school students who are English learners.
Penny Collins earned her B.A. in Psychology from the University of Western Ontario in 1991 and her Ph.D. in Applied Developmental Psychology from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto in 1997. She was a post-doctoral fellow at the University of British Columbia, where she worked on Linda Siegel's Longitudinal Reading Study. Prior to joining the faculty at UCI, she held faculty positions as Reading Educator at the State University of New York College at Fredonia and California State University, Fullerton.
Dr. Collins recognizes that a critical educational issue that educators and policy makers are grappling with is the achievement gap between students who are native English speakers and English learners, who not only must master the skills and content of the regular curriculum, but must do so while they are still developing proficiency in English. She explains, "Although teachers wish to use the best instructional practices to meet English learners' needs, there is limited research about what they should do." Among the questions that Dr. Collins studies in her research are the following: When screening children for risk for reading or math difficulties, should young English learners be tested in English or in their home language? If young English learners are experiencing difficulties in learning to read words, do you wait until their oral language skills in English improve or provide intervention early on? Are the instructional interventions that are effective with native English speakers also effective with English learners?
For Dr. Collins, the connection between research and practice is a critical one, and she has found a number of ways to apply her research to instructional practice both in the United States and abroad. In the United States, Dr. Collins served on a panel led by Russell Gersten that developed research-based recommendations for teachers and administrators in how best to meet the needs of English learners in school. This report, Effective Literacy and Language Instruction for English Learners in the Elementary Grades, An IES Practice Guide, was published by the U. S. Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences. She also co-authored the English Language Arts intervention for struggling readers (both native English speakers and English learners) in middle school, California Gateways: Mastering the California Standards. Internationally, Dr. Collins has developed a research design for studying beginning reading proficiency in developing countries for the World Bank; her design was implemented in countries such as Afghanistan. Additionally, she has traveled to South Africa to assist officials from the Ministry of Education, school administrators, local researchers and teacher educators develop Early Grade Reading Assessments in six of the eleven official languages.
