Collier, Virginia P. (1941-)

Virginia P. Collier was born in Greenup, Illinois, in November 1941. During her childhood, she spent 5 years in Mexico and Central America, and from age 12 on, she served as assistant to her father (a professor of Central American history at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro), conducting research in the libraries and archives of Guatemala City, San Salvador, Tegucigalpa, Managua, and San Jose.

Collier is professor ementa of bilingual/multicultural/ ESL education at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. She is best known for her work with senior researcher Wayne Thomas, conducting longitudinal research on school effectiveness for linguistically and culturally diverse students, working with many school districts in all regions of the United States over the past 22 years. Their award-winning national research studies have had a substantial impact on school policies throughout the world. She is coauthor with Carlos J. Ovando and Mary Carol Combs of a popular book for teachers, Bilingual and ESL Classrooms: Teaching in Multicultural Contexts, a well-known, comprehensive text on research, policy, and effective practices for serving students of culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds. In addition, Collier has over 70 other publications in the field of language minority education, including her popular monograph Promoting Academic Success for ESL Students.

In her collaborative work with Wayne Thomas, Collier has contributed new theoretical perspectives for the field of bilingual/multicultural education. The research partners are well-known for developing the prism model, a theory and guide to empirical research. This model makes predictions about program effectiveness from a theoretical perspective. Collier and Thomas have tested the prism model by collecting and analyzing program effectiveness data, and they have refined the model on the basis of empirical findings. They have also developed unique theoretical perspectives on analyses of longitudinal student data, to demonstrate the importance of following English learners' achievement over long periods of time. By following individual student progress over 5 to 6 years at minimum (instead of the typical 1 to 2 years), they have shown that the typical short-term finding of “no significant difference across programs” has misled the field and policymakers; in fact, long-term findings yield extremely significant differences among school programs. Importantly, they have found with consistency in each of their research studies that only high-quality bilingual schooling has the potential to close the academic achievement gap. By introducing degree of gap closure as the primary measure of program success, rather than pre-post score differences [Page 154]among groups, they have shown that English-only and transitional bilingual programs of short duration close only about half of the achievement gap, whereas high-quality long-term bilingual programs close all of the gap after 5 to 6 years of schooling through two languages.

After 24 years of teaching and conducting research, Collier retired from her position as professor of bilingual/multicultural/ESL education at George Mason University in 2005. During her association with George Mason, she served as research professor; associate director of degree programs for master's and doctoral students in bilingual/ESL education; director of the program for English as a Second Language (ESL) teachers; and instructor of graduate courses in methods, second-language acquisition, curriculum development, research, and policy in bilingual/multicultural/ESL and foreign-language education. In 1989, she received the Distinguished Faculty Award from George Mason University for excellence in teaching, scholarship, and service.

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