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PRINCETON UNIVERSITY
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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Date: April 4, 1996
Contact: Mary Caffrey (609) 258-5748
Andrea Rolla Named Recipient of 1996-97 Truman Scholarship
Princeton, N.J. -- Andrea Rolla, Class of 1997, has been named a winner of the 1996-97 Truman Scholarship, awarded annually to up to 75 American students who are third-year undergraduates and plan careers in public service.
Rolla, a 20-year-old junior from Dover, Mass., is a Romance languages major who is enrolled in the university's Teacher Preparation Program. Rolla, who plans to study bilingual education, has tutored Spanish-speaking students who live in Princeton and is active in Apoyo, an organization that assists Latin American immigrants in the Princeton area.
Rolla hopes to use her $30,000 Truman Scholarship to pursue a Ph.D. at the Harvard School of Education. The Truman Foundation permits scholarship winners to use $3,000 of the award during the last year of undergraduate study; the rest pays for graduate education.
During the spring semester of 1995, Rolla studied in Madrid, Spain. She then spent the summer working for a federal judge in Argentina, her parents' homeland. While there, Rolla taught English to Argentine students.
This semester, Rolla is doing research on dual immersion, the bilingual education method that pairs a group of students who speak English only with a group that speaks another language. Research on dual-immersion programs involving Spanish-speaking students at the elementary level has revealed that it works for both groups of students -- Spanish speakers grasp English more quickly than they do in monolingual programs, and English speakers learn a new language, Rolla said.
In addition to her other teaching activities, Rolla takes part in Quest, a classroom program that asks students in Princeton's Teacher Preparation Program to teach a unit of 'hands-on, science to elementary school students. Rolla's class included Spanish-speaking students from Johnson Park Elementary School in Princeton. Rolla was able to give these students lessons in Spanish and translate worksheets.
Rolla is also a Resident Advisor in Mathey College and is a coordinator of Peer-to-Peer, a counseling program.
Rolla is the daughter of Patricia Cormick of Dover, Mass., and Arturo-Raul Rolla of South Natick, Mass.