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Paola Uccelli

Paola Uccelli

Faculty Info

John H. and Elisabeth A. Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education

Degrees

Ed.D., Harvard University, (2003)

Areas of Expertise

Paola Uccelli

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Email

paola_uccelli@gse.harvard.edu

Personal Site

Language for Learning

Office

Larsen 320

Office Hours

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Faculty Coordinator

Robyn Ennis

Paola Uccelli is the John H. and Elisabeth A. Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. With a background in developmental linguistics, she studies socio-cultural and individual differences in multilingual and monolingual students’ language development across the school years. Her research identifies high-utility language skills and resources — at the lexical, grammatical, and discourse levels — that support reading, writing, and learning in school, and informs the design of interventions that affirm and amplify students’ voices. 

Uccelli developed the Core Analytical Language Skills (CALS) construct and instrument, which have advanced the understanding of how students’ language resources contribute to literacy and learning beyond the early grades. The CALS has been validated in English, and subsequently in Spanish and Portuguese in collaboration with Latin American partners, and versions are under development in Mandarin Chinese, Serbian, Norwegian, and German. Her work shows that without understanding individual differences in the language resources that children and adolescents bring to school and without attending to the language demands for school reading, writing, and learning, educational systems risk reproducing broader social inequalities.

Her current projects examine trajectories of school-relevant language development; develop and validate a digital instrument to assess these skills in elementary and middle school; and explore how monolingual and multilingual students learn to use diverse discourse structures for communication and learning. She conducts research in partnership with educators in the United States and internationally, with funding from organizations such as the Institute of Education Sciences, the Spencer Foundation, the Lemann Foundation, the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, and the Observatorio Cervantes. Uccelli studied linguistics at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú and earned her doctorate in human development and psychology at Harvard University. She co-chairs ProLEER, an international network focused on improving educational practice and policy, and leads the Language for Learning research team at HGSE.

  • Learning for All: An international comparative study
    Motivated by the overall question of "what makes a good school?", in this comparative, multi-disciplinary, and multi-method study we will investigate student outcomes in literacy and civic engagement during the transition from primary to secondary school in large urban settings in three countries: Botswana, Colombia, and Peru. In these three countries advances in educational quality lag considerably behind substantive economic and political progress; in other words, these countries have the political stability and economic resources to improve educational quality, but their students still display poor educational outcomes. The project will focus on four main mechanisms: student-teacher classroom interactions; student-parent home interactions; teacher-parent communication; and teachers', students', parents' wellbeing (economic and mental health wellbeing). More specifically, by comparing more and less successful schools within and across countries, we will focus on: (a) examining variability in the research-based mechanisms hypothesized to affect students' literacy and civic engagement; and (b) identifying and understanding how successful practices are implemented in ways that lead to better student outcomes in literacy and civic engagement.Funding source: Project funded by the Harvard Graduate School of Education Dean's Venture Fund. Principal Investigators: Felipe Barrera, Sarah Dryden-Peterson, Paola Uccelli.
  • Language for Learning in Chilean Adolescent Students
    In this collaborative research study Dr. Meneses' team from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile and Dr. Uccelli’s team from the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE) are working together to generate a test of academic language proficiency for monolingual Spanish-speaking students, Evaluación de Lenguage Académico . Dr. Uccelli and Dr. Meneses, who was a postdoctoral fellow at HGSE, worked together in the design of the Core Academic Language Skills Instrument (CALS-I), an innovative, theoretically-grounded and psychometrically robust instrument to track the development of school-relevant language skills in English-speaking students from 4th to 8th grade (Uccelli, Barr, Dobbs, Galloway, Meneses, & Sánchez, 2013). In the current project Uccelli and Meneses will extend their prior collaboration to design and pilot test a functionally equivalent and culturally appropriate Spanish version of the CALS-I and to explore the contribution of academic language skills to reading comprehension in monolingual Spanish-speaking Chilean students (Uccelli & Meneses, 2015).Funding source: Project funded by Harvard-Chile Innovation Grants, David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies 2014-2015 to Principal Investigators: Paola Uccelli, Harvard Graduate School of Education, & Alejandra Meneses, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile.
  • Core Academic Language Skills (CALS): Operational construct and instrument
    The Language for Learning Research Group, led by Dr. Paola Uccelli, engaged in a systematic review of the literature in order to design a construct of academic language skill that could inform assessment and instruction. The CALS construct is defined as a constellation of the high-utility language skills that correspond to linguistic features prevalent in oral and written academic discourse across school content areas and that are infrequent in colloquial conversations (e.g., knowledge of logical connectives, such as nevertheless, consequently; knowledge of structures that pack dense information, such as nominalizations or embedded clauses; knowledge of structures for organizing argumentative texts) Over the last years, as part of the Catalyzing Comprehension Through Discussion Debate project funded by IES to the Strategic Educational Research Partnership, Dr. Paola Uccelli and her research team have produced a research-based, theoretically-grounded, and psychometrically robust instrument to measure core academic language skills (CALS-I) for students in grades 4-8. This instrument has enabled us to directly measure a larger constellation of academic language skills that go beyond academic vocabulary and to offer direct evidence of strong associations between these skills and reading comprehension (Phillips-Galloway, Stude, Uccelli, in press; Uccelli, Barr, Dobbs, Phillips-Galloway, Meneses, & Sánchez, 2015; Uccelli, Phillips-Galloway, Barr, Meneses, & Dobbs, 2015).Funding source: The research was supported by the Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education, through Grant R305F100026 to the Strategic Education Research Partnership (SERP) as part of the Reading for Understanding Research Initiative.
  • Mapping Cross-Linguistic Writing Development in Adolescents
    The EF Project is conducted to explore individual differences in pre-adolescents' and adolescents' English academic language proficiency (or school-relevant language proficiency). With the focus on both second language learners and monolingual speakers, our study sample includes students from various socioeconomic backgrounds, language and cultural groups in the U.S., and internationally, from Russia and China. The findings have the potential to reveal the importance of language in school learning across contexts and content areas. Our ultimate goal is to highlight the importance of ongoing adolescent language development for educators, researchers, and policy makers by revealing how teachers' and students' ways of using language support advances in students' text comprehension, academic writing, and school achievement. Funding source: EF Education First Grant (2013 - 2016), Principal Investigator, Paola Uccelli
  • Connectives Intervention with Elementary Grade Students
    In collaboration with Diane August (Center for Applied Linguistics), Chris Barr (University of Houston), & Lauren Artzi (Center for Applied Linguistics), this study was conducted as part of the VIAS: Vocabulary Instruction and Assessment for Spanish Speakers, a subproject of the NIH-funded project entitled, Acquisition of Vocabulary in English (AVE). This project developed and tested a vocabulary intervention as part of a larger vocabulary study designed to improve language and literacy skills in Spanish/English bilingual second graders. An assessment of text connectives for early primary school students, as well as a five-week intervention that demonstrated promising results, are part of the products of this project.Funding source: The Vocabulary Instruction and Assessment for Spanish Speakers (VIAS) project was a 5-year program of research funded through grants from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) and the U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences (IES). The grants supported research on the literacy and language development of Spanish-speaking English language learners (ELLs) conducted by investigators at the Center for Applied Linguistics and its collaborators, Harvard University, Boston College, the University of Connecticut, and the University of Houston.

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