This CAREER grant seeks funding for a systematic research program aimed at investigating the root causes of the underachievement of African American students in science. An important part of this project will be to use the research findings to propose and field test classroom intervention programs aimed at enabling teachers to help African American Students improvement their achievement.
The work builds on that of Ogbu who has written extensively on the question of academic performance of minority students in American schools. A specific research question is how the performance of these students in science is affected by their language use. Both quantitative and qualitative research methods will be used. Individual students and teachers as well as classrooms will be used as units of analysis
