Current Research on Multilingual Students and Mathematics Education

This paper is written as a companion piece to the Coalition for English Learner Equity (CELE) Statement of Agreement. The purpose of the paper is to describe some of the research based assumptions and findings that form the research basis for the agreement, the EL Success Forum Guidelines, and the work that lies ahead for teachers, school administrators, district leaders, content developers, and other advocates for “English learners” (ELs), or multilingual students. A shared framework will serve as a document to guide our decisions and engagement at all levels including moment-to-moment decisions that take place in the classroom, decisions that are deliberated over time, and decisions that involve many stakeholders. This paper summarizes the major findings from research on multilingual students in mathematics classrooms so that our work with that student population can proceed from a place of scholarly rigor, dispelling notions that are less productive or not founded on research.

Brittany Caldwell, Julianne Foxworthy Gonzalez, & Salvador Huitzilopochtli, UC Santa Cruz