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Multiple Perspectives from a Decade of Longitudinal Research Overview of Structured Poster/Table Session |
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Overcoming the minority achievement gap continues to challenge our society. One barrier is a research base that includes too few studies of minority performance employing longitudinal designs. In this session, we present results from a longitudinal study of immigrant Latino families and their children begun in 1989. A major focus has been on factors associated with long-term academic success as well as persisting underachievement of children who entered kindergarten speaking Spanish. In this session, we describe the variable trajectories of school achievement in reading and math and some of the factors associated with those variations.
Students in the projects random sample, currently entering 11th grade, exhibit a wide range of academic outcomesfrom students with 4.0 GPAs in college preparatory and honors programs to those with multiple absences and failing grades in continuation high schools. The groups variability with respect to academic performance, combined with a 75% sample retention rate through the 11 years of the study, make it ideal for the investigation of factors associated with school success for this population.
To the best of our knowledge, this is the only extended longitudinal study of Latino youth that has deployed a mixed method approach, used a random sampling, and gathered data from parents, youth, and teachers. To increase representation of the population, we randomly selected 121 Spanish-speaking children entering kindergarten in nine classrooms in five schools in two different districts. Each year we have interviewed the parents, and since 1999 we have been talking directly to the teenagers themselves (for details on Methods see Poster 1; for results, see Posters 2, 3, 4, & 5). At kindergarten entry in 1989, when they were recruited into our sample, all of these students were Spanish-speaking, and all but a few were placed in Spanish reading instruction. All of the parents were born outside of the U.S. (84% in Mexico), while 75% of the children were born in the United States. Families were low-income for the most part, with both mothers and fathers averaging 7.0 years of schooling.
In this session we present new analyses of factors associated with student academic performance, never previously reported and which go beyond our previous publications, e.g. Reese, Garnier, Gallimore & Goldenberg, in press. Two of the posters present quantitative and qualitative data that cover the period from kindergarten through middle school, one focused on achievement trajectories in reading (Poster 2) and the other on mathematics (Poster 3). Poster 2 examines reading trajectories of students as they moved from Spanish into English instruction at different grade levels. In addition, Poster 2 presents an analysis of the long-term predictors of English reading achievement, which reveals important contributions that families make through encouraging early Spanish literacy development. Poster 3 analyzes mathematics trajectories, and tells a quite different story than the reading data. The math trajectories of our sample students show no effect of the transition to English instruction. Two of the posters (4 & 5) draw on our most recent contacts with teenagers themselves. Poster 4 presents cases of very high achieving youth, and examines the role that fathers play in those who remained highly engaged in school and those that do not, despite their high test scores. Poster 5 presents an analysis of the ways ethnic identity emerges in the youths narratives about their daily lives. Poster 1 addresses methods, sampling, and procedures, with a focus on "how we know what we know" about the Longitudinal Sample.
The Structured Poster/Table Session will open with a brief overview of the five papers and an introduction of the authors, followed by approximately 40 minutes for visitors to view and informally discuss the posters as they circulate about the room. The last 45 minutes of the session will be devoted to roundtable discussions. Although the posters will remain available for viewing, participants will be encouraged to join one of the roundtables to discuss the studys findings and implications for policy and practice. Both discussion handouts and research papers will be distributed. We feel that this format will encourage a greater exchange of information among all participants than is possible through a conventional symposium format, while extending the poster format to include a more structured presentation and discussion of findings.
The Longitudinal Study: How Did We Learn What We Know about the Longitudinal Sample? Ronald Gallimore, Leslie Reese, & Edward Lopez (UCLA)
The theme of AERA this year is "What Do We Know, and How Do We Know It?" The other four posters present WHAT weve learned from our longitudinal study; this one describes HOW we know what we know about our sample of Latino families and youth.
From the outset in 1989, we employed a mixed method approach combining quantitative and qualitative procedures. The intent was to provide a multifaceted perspective on many issues including, including parental attitudes and practices regarding learning and schooling, parent and student aspirations and expectations for students academic and occupational outcomes, parents and students emic perspectives regarding education, success, ethnicity and friendship, family immigration histories, and student achievement. We used interviews (structured, semi-structured, and open-ended), observations (in homes & classrooms) checklists, child assessments, school records, teacher interviews, standardized reading and math scores, kindergarten English and Spanish fluency tests, and a test of emergent or early Spanish reading development (pre-k and post-k). We conducted extended home visits, making observations of family life while informally visiting with parents. We gave disposable cameras to adolescents and then used prints as informal interview prompts, in order to learn about their "worlds" as they saw them through the lens of a camera.
The poster will include examples of some of the principles that guided the study including:
1. Illustrative Case Studies: Cases and qualitative materials were collected from families/individuals we randomly chose from the larger Longitudinal Sample. The goal was to make cases representative of the larger sample, rather than opportunistically selected. 2. Disconfirming Evidence: Anecdotes are useful and powerful, but they can also be highly misleading. While anecdotes can suggest new lines of work and provide compelling illustrations, it is vital to determine if they actually are representative or are exceptions. We sought to confirm that anecdotes reflected a pattern as opposed to an exception, and we deliberately sought disconfirming evidence from other cases and the sample as a whole. 3. Recursive Design: We conducted both exploratory and confirmatory studies, using qualitative and quantitative methods depending on which was the most appropriate to the question. If an unexpected or unexplained statistical finding emerged, we attended to it in subsequent home visits that provided a validity and reliability check. Similarly, qualitative discoveries were systematically checked in subsequent quantitative data collections. 4. Opportunistic Use of Unexpected Findings: Our research team expected qualitative and quantitative results to converge; however, when they diverged, this ignited further exploration to determine why divergence occurred. In longitudinal studies, one of the major HOWS is keeping the sample in tact. Also discussed in this poster are ways in which the sample of a highly mobile population was retained over the 12-year period.
Reading Trajectories of Immigrant Latino Students in Transitional Bilingual Programs. Leslie Reese, Ronald Gallimore, Don Guthrie (UCLA), & Claude Goldenberg (CSULB)
Program effectiveness, with particular emphasis on language of instruction and instructional delivery methods, has been a major area of research focus in the area of bilingual education. In many studies (cf. Ramirez,1992; Thomas & Collier, 1997), the unit of analysis has been program type (for example, transitional bilingual or structured immersion). This paper, on the other hand, examines variation in student performance within a single program type. Using data from the random sample of Latino students, tracked throughout their elementary and middle school years, we examine ways in which outcomes vary for students of similar language and socioeconomic background who are initially instructed in their native language in transitional bilingual programs. As the students made the transition to instruction in English, which took place for most students in the sample between grades 2 and 4, all students experienced an abrupt decline in performance on standardized test scores. The mean drop in performance between English and Spanish testing was 35 percentile points. However, the instructional program was more effective with some students than others, depending in part on the educational assets, or cultural capital, with which children entered school. Thus, performance trajectories after transition took markedly different paths, with higher achievers quickly surpassing pre-transition rates of performance and with a sub-set of lower achievers continuing an achievement decline that began for them while still being instructed in Spanish. The paper also looks at school factors potentially associated with variations in performance for sub-sets of the sample: students in a school undergoing a sustained, school-wide reform effort; students receiving a strong kindergarten reading program with results surpassing all other classrooms in the district; and students arbitrarily placed in all-English instruction.
Antecedents of Mathematics Achievement of Immigrant Latino Youth in Middle-School. Edward M. Lopez & Ronald Gallimore (UCLA)
Latino youth leave the mathematics pipe-line as early as elementary school compared to European Americans and Asian students. As a result, Latino students more often are placed in remedial mathematics programs in middle school and these experiences continue to restrict their future mathematics opportunities during high school and college. Much research on these issues has focused on the mathematics experiences of Latino youth in high school, such as access to college-prep math curricula and gate-keepers who restrict students' future mathematics learning opportunities. This paper pushes the pipe-line model focus back to elementary school and before, introducing the variable of school readiness to conceptualize ways that family factors prepare children differentially to take advantage of formal instruction. Using data from the longitudinal study described in Poster 1, family demographics (e.g., parents' levels of education / occupations / years in the U.S.), school readiness (e.g., kindergarten pre- and post-tests), and elementary math achievement (e.g., standardized math test scores from grades 1-5) were used to predict middle school math scores. Analysis indicated that Latino students' school readiness and elementary math tests scores are significantly predictive of middle school mathematics achievement. In contrast to findings with the same sample for reading achievement (e.g., Poster 2), family background demographics showed weak or no predictive value. Results are discussed in the form of emphasizing more effective mathematics school programs at earlier grades. This study has implications for practitioners, policy makers, and programs designed to enhance the mathematical education and career opportunities for ethnic minority youth.
Case Studies of High Achieving Latinas: Academic Success in Contrasting Settings. Analee Haro, Maria Casado, Corina Rico, & Leslie Reese (UCLA)
Latino students who have been able to succeed academically can offer an important perspective to the discourse about Latinos and education. Patricia Gandara's Over the Ivy Walls (1995) points to common factors that many successful Latinos have in common. Participants in her study had high standards, felt strong support at home, had mothers who exerted great influence on their lives, attended desegregated or mostly Anglo schools, and had dual reference groups. Using these findings as a point of departure, this paper uses a contrastive analysis of illustrative case studies (Sechrest et al., 1996) drawn from the Longitudinal Sample to reveal similarities and differences between two high achieving students in very different school settings. One student, who matches the profile described above, attends a science magnet program in which Latinos comprise 28% of the student body and where 100% of Latinos are eligible to apply to the University of California (UC). The other student, more representative of others in the Longitudinal Sample, is attending her neighborhood high school where 75 % of the student body is Latino and only 18% of Latinos are UC-eligible. Data is drawn not only from current open-ended interviews with the students themselves but also includes longitudinal case information from kindergarten on regarding student academic trajectories, test scores and teacher ratings; parent interview data on values, child rearing and home study practices; and observations in home and classroom settings. Findings indicate that the students are similar in their persistence, efforts to take challenging courses, and the decision not to work to concentrate on academics. However, there are also differences in the cases, particularly in the challenges that the student who attends her neighborhood high school has to overcome to continue her success. Unlike the magnet school, the neighborhood school does not offer all necessary college-preparatory classes and is characterized by an overall atmosphere that is not always conducive to learning. In addition, the role of the father in actively supporting his daughter's schooling differs between the two cases. These two cases provide insights into ways that Latino students are able to succeed, particularly in challenging circumstances.
Ethnic Identity in Second-Generation Latino Youths Narratives of Their Everyday Lives. Maria Casado, Leslie Reese, Analee Haro & Edward Lopez (UCLA)
One way to conceptualize Mexican-origin adolescents' ethnicity has been through typologies marked by differences in ethnic identity and academic achievement. Another view regarding identity and youth speaks of "embedded identities" (Heath and McLaughlin, 1993), or adolescents' self-representations extending beyond fixed labels and dichotomies, that call into question the salience of ethnic identity for young Latinos in their daily lives. The present analysis utilized the longitudinal sample of second-generation Latino high-school students and was driven by two questions: How prevalent is ethnic identity as a narrative theme in open-ended interviews with teens regarding school, peers, and daily activities? Second, when issues of ethnicity are presented, how is ethnic identity perceived by the adolescents themselves? In keeping with Heath and McLaughlin's contention that inner-city youths' ethnic identification tends to be conditional or latent, our findings reveal that ethnic identity is not spontaneously expressed by the majority of youth in our sample. Spontaneous references to ethnic identification did not vary by gender or academic performance. With a subset of cases (15%) in which issues of ethnicity did emerge in the teenagers' narratives, the idiosyncratic significance and context of ethnic identity that these students presented was explored by representing their personal semantic networks. Representation of ethnic identity for this group of young people emerges as having two major components: a multiplicity of self-defining terms that are sometimes used interchangeably, and situational contexts (e.g. career plans, peer groups, parental rules and child rearing, activities) in which ethnic identity may be differentially expressed. These findings call attention to the varied ways that ethnicity has relevance to some Latino teens. Our findings speak to the need for further exploration of the multi-layered construction of identity as it is relevant to Latino youth.
Gandara, P. (1995). Over the Ivy Walls: The Educational Mobility of Low-Income Chicanos. New York: State University of New York Press, Albany.
Heath, S.B. & McLaughlin, M. (1993). Beyond Identity.
Ramirez, D. (1992). Executive Summary. Bilingual Research Journal, Vol. 16, No. 1/2, 1-61.
Reese, L., Garnier, H., Gallimore, R. & Goldenberg, C. (In press). A Longitudinal Analysis of the Ecocultural Antecedents of Emergent Spanish Literacy and Subsequent English Reading Achievement of Spanish-speaking Students. American Educational Research Journal.
Sechrest, L., Stewart, M., Stickle, T. & Sidani, S. (1996). Effective and Persuasive Case Studies. Tucson: Jaguar Graphics.
Thomas, W. & Collier, V. (1997). School Effectiveness for Language Minority Students. Washington, D.C.: National Clearinghouse for Bilingual Education. |
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