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Education and developmental competencies of ethnic minority children: Recent theoretical and methodological advances
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Developmental Review journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/dr
Education and developmental competencies of ethnic minority children: Recent theoretical and methodological advances ⁎
Amy K. Marksa, , Cynthia Garcia Collb a b
Suffolk University, Boston, MA, United States Carlos Albizu University, PR, United States
A R T IC LE I N F O
ABS TRA CT
Keywords: Education Competency Academic Success Minority Theoretical
In 1996, Garcia Coll and colleagues published a theoretical article detailing the many ways an integrative approach to studying minority child development is necessary. Advances in theory and methods since have pushed forward our thinking about how minority youth develop and achieve educational success in school contexts. This paper reviews research and theory since the 1996 article on ethnic minority children and adolescents in the US school system, attending to how empirical evidence and methods have supported the integrative model. Ethnic minority children’s competencies are emphasized. We also highlight areas of growth needed in this research subfield, as well as specific ideas for using mixed-methodologies in the study of ethnic minority children. Particular attention is paid to the unique developmental competencies ethnic and racial minority youth must develop in order to be successful in the US school system, and implications for policy and practice are discussed.
Introduction Understanding the educational experiences of and achievement patterns among ethnic and racial minority children is increasingly vital to the future stability, productivity, and health of the U.S. In the U.S., ethnic and racial minority1 children make up roughly half of the public school-aged population; by 2026, the proportion of ethnic and racial minority children enrolled in public primary and secondary schools is expected to climb to 55% (NCES, 2017). These demographic changes were driven largely by migration, bringing diversification to the U.S. school population in terms of ethnic/racial composition, as well as languages spoken, religiosity, and other cultural practice domains. With global migration on the rise, particularly for youth populations, it is likely the U.S. child population will continue to diversify in these ways (see article by Marks, Seaboyer, & Garcia Coll, 2015 for a review of immigration and education in the U.S.). Approximately 20 years ago, García Coll and colleagues introduced a theoretical framework to guide researchers, educators, practitioners, and policy makers in understanding the developmental experiences and outcomes of ethnic/racial minority youth (García Coll et al., 1996). This framework took an ecological approach, acknowledging macro- and micro-systemic influences on minority children’s development. According to the model, ethnic/racial minority children’s development must be considered first in terms of the social position variables a child is born into (e.g., race, social class, ethnicity, and gender), as well as environmental forces and practices of racism, prejudice, discrimination, oppression, and segregation. In particular, the authors highlighted the ⁎
Corresponding author at: 73 Tremont Street, Psychology Department, Suffolk University, Boston, MA, United States. E-mail address: akmarks@suffolk.edu (A.K. Marks). 1 The word minority is used in this manuscript to describe relative social, economic, or political power. It does not necessarily refer to a group or individual member of a group that is small in number. For example, women are a slight majority of the U.S. population, but are considered a gender minority group due to their lower social and economic power when compared to men. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dr.2018.05.004 Received 31 October 2017; Received in revised form 6 May 2018 0273-2297/ © 2018 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Please cite this article as: Marks, A.K., Developmental Review (2018), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dr.2018.05.004
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Fig. 1. Integrative model for the study of developmental competencies in minority children.
unique inhibiting and promoting environments that influence how children of color might fare academically (see Fig. 1), including contextual influences from schools, neighborhoods, and health care settings. The roles of promoting/inhibiting environments are to either enhance or mitigate the effects of social position variables and oppressive social forces on the particular child or group, shaping how children and families adapt and respond developmentally to these pressures. For example, in order to understand the academic achievement outcomes of a second-grade Latina student at a middle-class public school, we must first acknowledge the social positionality of her own social class, her ethnicity and race, and her gender, as each may be prone to varied forces of racism, prejudice, discrimination, and oppression, depending on where she lives. These forces, very importantly, influence her both directly and indirectly through the experiences of her family and herself as members of communities, schools, work places, health care systems, and similar contexts. Ultimately, her school and neighborhood will serve as important places that could either promote larger societal stereotypes and oppressive policies, or provide protection against them and promote alternative adaptations. Such situations are playing-out today in the U.S., as some U.S. cities defend their immigrant citizens by declaring themselves as “sanctuary cities,” offering protections to citizens from unlawful entry and police searches that could lead to deportation (Critchley & Trembly, 2017). These cities stand in contrast to others which use aggressive policing among their immigrant communities (e.g., Supreme Court vs. Arizona, Critchley & Trembly, 2017, p. 35). Coming after a history of ‘deficit models’ in research by which minority children consistently appear to underachieve compared to their majority peers, this integrative, contextualized model provided a new way of viewing and understanding the ethnic/racial achievement gaps that continue to pervade our educational system (Harry & Klingner, 2007). Deficit models are built when children's outcomes are measured without taking into account contextual, interactional, and systemic factors that would disproportionately, negatively affect one group of children more than another (see Marotz-Baden, Adams, Bueche, & Munro, 1979; Garcia Coll, Akerman, & Cicchetti, 2000). The myriad of national U.S. studies since the 1970s that have pointed to achievement gaps in public school outcomes are one example (Kurtz-Costes, Swinton, & Skinner, 2014). In these studies, white children consistently appear to outperform children of color, sometimes by as much as 30 points on standardized exams (Musu-Gillette et al., 2016). According to the integrative model, these findings would not be surprising, if the forces of segregation, oppression, economic injustice, and racism could be fully accounted for. Further, if we as researchers do not fully consider these essential contextual forces, we run the risk of building a scientific base of information that leads to the conclusion that children of color are not as smart as (or more impulsive or less regulated than, etc.) White children. In this analysis, it is the individual child, family, or group that is not “achieving, behaving”, etc., like a norm (implicitly, a white majority), for reasons attributed intrinsically to the individual, the family, and the group. It is essential, in contrast, that researchers not only attend to the precipitating social, political, and economic forces shaping minority children’s family, school and community experiences, but also actively seek to understand and document their adaptations, resiliency, and many competencies forged in spite of such systemic failures on their behalf. The current review took two approaches to understand the impact of the original 1996 Integrative Model on the recent corpus of education-related research. The first approach identified studies published in 1997 or thereafter that directly cited the original paper. 2
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The second approach combined a variety of key terms used in the Integrative Model to examine main topic areas of research studies starting in 1997. Though these papers did not specifically cite the model per se, examining their contents allows us to understand the newer, related ideas of study which can be used both to update the original model, as well as characterize future directions of research that appear to be emerging. The methods for the reviews, as well as the results of the content analysis of articles are presented below. These are followed by a summary of the themes as they map onto the original model, ending with ideas for future studies while highlighting the new areas that have emerged in the field since the original 1996 model was published.
Review methods The goal of this paper is to summarize advances that have been made in the cultural developmental science of academic achievement among students of color and other minority youth since the 1996 García Coll and colleagues’ model was published. To this end, we conducted two literature searches to identify papers that had either explicitly used the integrative model in empirical research or to further advance theoretical positions or frameworks relevant to education with minority youth, or used terminology emphasized by the model (but did not directly cite the model) in the conceptualization of their studies. Our timeframe for both the broader search and for articles specifically citing the Garcia Coll et al. paper for publication year was 1997–2017, spanning about 20 years of scholarship. We also included articles published in English, and articles that were peer-reviewed. To identify studies that specifically referenced the original model, we used Google scholar. We also used ERIC and Web of Science to combine search terms in the psychological and educational peer-reviewed literature data bases, filtering papers again for citation of the original 1996 paper. The following Boolean statement was used in these searches: (integrative model OR context OR competency OR strengths OR positive) AND (minority) AND (academic OR education OR school). The more comprehensive search included a similar Boolean statement as above, but without the use of the “integrative model” phrase or restricting results to citing the original 1996 paper. The rationale for searching in this way was to cast a broad net for studies which might have used the competency-based lens on minority youth educational experiences and outcomes, while leaving room for new topics which were not included in the original 1996 model to emerge. We sought articles that fulfilled the spirit of the 1996 integrative model by including at least one outcome or developmental process related to competency, positive development, or resilience in education. This search methodology was not intended to be fully systematic, but it was rather targeted to the peerreviewed empirical or theoretical journal article literature base to examine how the integrative model has been applied to or inspired research and theory on educational competencies among minority youth. The search strategy was suited to the purpose of documenting broad themes in the peer-reviewed literature, and revealing areas for future development and application of the model.
Results of reviews A total of 4,062 peer-reviewed journal articles were identified using the broader search strategy outlined above. The number of articles matching our search term criteria increased steadily over time; from 1997 to 2002 there were 343 articles identified in the search. During the last 5 years from 2012 to 2017, there were 2,015. After eliminating articles addressing adult education outcomes (including a large subset of articles about medical education), over 1,000 articles remained. Examining titles and abstracts from the past year alone, a great diversity of topics were covered in this large research base. We retained the most recent 200 articles to move forward with establishing current content trends in the field with respect to topics related to the original 1996 integrative model. Next, a subset of 45 articles was identified from our larger search from 1997 to 2017 as explicitly referencing the original Integrative Model paper. Examining these articles’ publication dates revealed a clear peak during the years 2005–2008 for studies published specifically referencing the integrative model in education-related minority youth research or theory. Although some of the initial papers published after the model were theoretical in nature (e.g., applying the model to specific contexts such as school counseling or childcare systems for minority youth, e.g., Hatzichristou, 1998, and Johnson, Jaeger, Randolph, Cauce, & Ward, 2003, respectively), the majority of research following the integrative framework has been empirical and quantitative. From the two searches combined, articles covered education-related experiences and outcomes from preschool through emerging adulthood, though the early childhood (Kindergarten and early elementary school) and adolescent periods were the two most common developmental periods in which the integrative model was explicitly applied. As noted above, a wide variety of topics were covered in these studies. These topic areas were counted across studies and their relative frequency among the larger group was calculated. This information is presented in Table 1, grouped by the topics’ correspondence to the main constructs presented in the original 1996 model. Examining the Table reveals a heavy emphasis on studies that examined social position variables and promoting/inhibiting environments as a main goal. Approximately 50% of the papers identified also emphasized education-related outcomes; the others sought to characterize school-related experiences or processes in some way. Research topics that emerged from our content analysis that were not explicitly emphasized in the original 1996 paper are included in this table in italics. Though most research was conducted in the U.S., several papers from scholars in Europe were conducting work aligned with the 1996 model as well (e.g., a paper examining how ethnic and non-ethnic victimization by peers relates to school belonging, D’hondt, Houtte, & Stevens, 2015). With this broad overview in mind, we present the following themes and examples of lessons learned from taking the integrative lens to understand minority youth educational experiences, competencies, and outcomes identified from the two searches above.
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Contextual influences on academic outcomes: Promoting/Inhibiting Environments, Family, and Adaptive Culture Focusing specifically on the research examining academic processes and school outcomes, many scholars used the integrative model to support their investigations of contextual influences on ethnic/racial minority youth competency development in school (e.g., Masten & Coatsworth, 1998). Clear advances in cultural developmental approaches to understanding ethnic minority youth education emphasized the importance of family, school, and neighborhood contexts on promoting positive academic attitudes. Importantly, the most recent research in ethnic minority youth competencies clearly demonstrates the interconnectedness of family, school, and neighborhood effects as inhibitors or promotors of child and adolescent academic success over time (e.g., Bhargava & Witherspoon, 2015; Sibley & Brabeck, 2017). Though these constructs were separated in the original 1996 model, recent studies are bringing them together in unique ways. Family contextual influences are measured in many ways, including family structural variables (e.g., family size and composition), resources (e.g., maternal education, home resources such as books and computers), and practices (e.g., facilitating homework, fostering positive attitudes toward learning, positive parenting practices and teacher alliances). Families in our review were portrayed as facilitating school success through promoting resources at home and maintaining low conflict (Bradley & Corwyn, 2000), and by promoting emotional support (Iruka, Gardner-Neblett, Matthews, & Winn, 2014). For example, in a prevention-intervention study, higher levels of family support and organization were related to parent and teacher rated child academic competency among African American families with children in kindergarten (Smith, Prinz, Dumas, & Laughlin, 2001). Families can also play an inhibiting role in children’s schooling as well. In a study of Hispanic kindergarteners, approximately 20% of students were not promoted to 1st grade (Willson & Hughes, 2006). One of the predictors of retention was parents’ low reported perceived responsibility for their children’s success; poor teacher-student relationships also significantly predicted retention in this study as well. It is important to note that the effects of family resources and processes on minority youth outcomes vary both by ethnic/racial group, as well as by family structural composition (e.g., Heard, 2007; Suizzo & Stapleton, 2007). For example, Heard found that having a recent family change such as living with a new caregiver leads to a sharper drop in GPA when compared with Latinx youth. Further, for most minority youth in the study, negative academic effects of family structure (such as living with a single parent) could be attenuated by race-specific social supports (Heard, 2007). It appears from such studies that we are now moving beyond using broad demographic categories as explanatory constructs, and moving into the specification of more nuanced contextual processes. In the school context itself, teachers and peers alike played important roles in shaping minority students’ experiences. The school context can serve as either an inhibiting or promoting environment, based on its characteristics and their interactions with the child and family’s characteristics. In one study, a meaningful portion of African American students’ GPAs could be explained by having a positive family environment and positive teacher perceptions of students’ social skills and academic ability (Seyfried, 1998). Among American Indian and Alaska Native children, teacher-rated positive attitudes toward learning were associated with better cognitive skill development in the first 3 years of elementary school (Marks & Garcia Coll, 2007). In another study, whether Latino adolescents’ perceived discrimination experiences impacted their achievement in school was dependent on whether adolescents’ perceived their school climate as supportive or not (Benner & Graham, 2011). Peer and adult support in school also has been shown to mitigate the effects of discrimination on students’ self-efficacy, school belonging, and depressive symptoms as well (Gonzalez, Stein, Kiang, & Cupito, 2014). Unfortunately, many of the negative, inhibiting effects of teacher-student conflict appear to be particularly threatening to minority youth. In a recent study with young African American children in elementary school, African American ethnicity (and not SES or IQ) was uniquely associated with increasing conflict in student-teacher relationship quality over time (Split & Hughes, 2015). Studies such as these continue to point to the necessity for using minority-specific theoretical models to guide the research of education experiences of minority youth in the U.S. Though fewer studies have examined multi-contextual influences on ethnic/racial minority youth academic outcomes within the same study, evidence exists showing that proximal contexts (e.g., individual and family) are potently tied more directly to academic outcomes than more distal contexts (e.g., neighborhood, see Marks, Godoy, & Garcia Coll, 2013). That said, neighborhood characteristics are extremely important when considering interventions, as they appear to play a more indirect role in shaping students’ academic outcomes. In one study, the number of community resources accessed by African American adolescents was significantly related to higher levels of school aspiration (Nichols, Kotchick, Barry, & Haskins, 2009), a construct widely shown in the literature to be linked with student academic success. In another study of neighborhood contexts, researchers measured contextual stress stemming from community violence and experiences with racial discrimination (Copeland-Linder, Lambert, Chen, & Ialongo, 2010). The African American adolescents in this study who reported higher levels of contextual stress were more likely to struggle with substance use and behavior problems two years later. These effects were mitigated by feelings of self-worth and beliefs in one’s own academic competency – again implicating neighborhood contextual stressors as indirect inhibitors of school success, and supporting the vital importance of individual-level child competencies and positive mindsets for academic achievement (see theme on academic mindset below). Discrimination’s impact on academic experiences and outcomes Discrimination – which appears as a centrally important component of the integrative model’s approach to understanding minority youth development – became an increasingly studied topic in the literature over the past decade. About 1/3rd of the studies examined in this review covered topics related to discrimination, racism, stereotypes, and other related social oppression (see Table 1). One study noted that 32% of African-American 38% of Latinx, and 13% of Caucasian students had been discouraged from 4
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Table 1 Main topics found among the 200 most recent education-focused empirical literature related to the Integrative Model. Construct from the model
Prevalence
Specific topics studied
(1) Social position variables Race/ethnicity Social class Gender (2) Racism/Prejudice/Discrimination/ Oppression (3) Segregation (4) Promoting/Inhibiting Environments
65% 50% 10% 5% 35%
LGBTQ youth positionality; rural-urban effects; immigration or legal status Race/ethnicity; culture of origin (immigrant youth) Low-income; poverty Female/male effects Discrimination (many forms); marginalization/social exclusion; isolation; stereotypes; intergroup processes; minority stress model
0% 60%
Schools
35%
Neighborhoods Health care
10% 15%
(5) (6) (7) (8)
Adaptive Culture Child Characteristics Family Developmental Competencies: Academic
15% 20% 15% 50%
Social networking; peer environments; academic social support from larger community/mentors; interventions Ethnic school composition; school climate; school structure; school belonging; teacher characteristics; school discipline; mentor/advisor access and characteristics; bullying Community-based policy; community characteristics; exposure to conflict/violence/abuse Inclusivity/access to services for minority youth (includes counseling services in schools; disabilities); mental health Acculturation; bilingualism; civic engagement; advocacy/social justice Health (e.g., obesity); Self-efficacy; self-compassion & affirmation; sexuality; identities Positive parenting; parent involvement; parent-teacher relations Student engagement & attitudes; achievement; math/STEM outcomes; gifted students/high-potential students of color; academic help-seeking behavior
Notes: Numbered constructs correspond to the original Figure from the Integrative model; percentages rounded to the nearest 5%; Specific topics in italics are newer to the literature/not specifically included in the original Integrative Model.
joining advanced level classes, were disciplined wrongly by teachers, or were graded unfairly because of their race (Fisher, Wallace, & Fenton, 2000). A recent systematic review of the effects of discrimination on child development revealed a spike in discriminationrelated developmental research post 9–11, 2001 (Marks, Ejesi, McCullough, & Garcia Coll, 2015). A similar increase in the literature tied to the integrative model was observed in our analyses for this paper as well; by 2005, the number of articles addressing discrimination in school and other educational settings in the U.S. increased notably. Among these articles, as was also observed in the literature review cited above, several themes could be observed. Predominantly, children perceive discrimination from both peers and teachers in the school context, with teachers often reported as the most potent source of detrimental effects to children’s future academic attainment (Marks, et al., 2015). For example, one study documented how children’s minority status and socioeconomic disadvantage – two important social position variables noted in the 1996 model – predict children’s relationship quality with their teachers (Fitzpatrick, Côté-Lussier, Pagani, & Blair, 2015). This study, conducted in Canada, noted that even controlling for past academic performance, “visible minority” children and children with socioeconomic disadvantage were 50% and 35% less likely to report positive relationships with teachers, respectively. The general effects of discrimination on academic-related outcomes are many, with complex social nuances needed to understand the fullness of this deep societal problem in education. In a study of ideological approaches to understanding one’s ethnic/racial identity and its relations to discrimination and school outcomes, U.S. adolescents who believed they should be more like White students in their schooling also showed lower persistence in their educational pursuits, as well as more behavioral problems in response to discrimination (Smalls, White, Chavous, & Sellers, 2007). One longitudinal study examined the effects of perceived racial discrimination from teachers and peers among African American 7th graders. In both peer and teacher domains, increases in perceived discrimination predicted drops in grades, children’s lower academic self-concept, and threats to several other markers of wellbeing and resilience (Wong, Eccles, & Sameroff, 2003). Taking a competency orientation, these authors also identified that having a positive connection to a racial/ethnic group served as a buffer against the negative effects of perceived discrimination. In another study, clear evidence was found again for the mediating effect of having a positive connection to one’s ethnic/racial group for reducing the effects of discrimination on academic outcomes among African American adolescents (Eccles, Wong, & Peck, 2006). These findings, taken together, provide some empirical support for the integrative model – both in the potential for discrimination to harm a child’s academic success, as well as the power of positive ethnic/racial identity development to buffer these effects and promote resiliency. The literature base remains mixed, however, in whether and how parent socialization may be able to mitigate the effects of discrimination on academic outcomes. For example, in another study, African American adolescents who perceived discrimination were more likely to suffer in academic curiosity, persistence, and grades (Neblett, Philip, Cogburn, & Sellers, 2006). Although racial socialization from family also was related to their academic outcomes, these practices did not appear to ameliorate the effects of discrimination on students’ outcomes. In another study, Chinese American parents’ own experiences with discrimination increased their adolescents’ perceptions of perpetual foreigner stress, which in turn lowered adolescents’ attitudes toward their education (Benner & Kim, 2009). Taken together, these studies depict a complex picture of how discrimination affects family systems, in turn both promoting and inhibiting minority children’s successful adaptations in their educational pursuits.
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Child Characteristics & Adaptive Culture: School belonging, engagement, and positive mindsets as important mechanisms for minority youth success The call of the integrative model to focus on children’s competencies has inspired many studies documenting various types of resources and resiliency profiles among minority youth. Among these have surfaced the powerful effects of positive mindsets and academic aspirations, as well as markers of school belonging, engagement, and related constructs for promoting minority youth academic success. In one study, greater maternal warmth facilitated ethnic/racial minority adolescents’ academic engagement and motivation (Lowe & Dotterer, 2013). For children at the earliest stages of their schooling, having positive attitudes toward learning appear to be a vital asset for minority youth. In one nationally-representative longitudinal study of American Indian and Alaska Native (AIAN) children, kindergartener’s teacher-rated positive attitudes were as powerful at predicting gains in math and readingrelated cognitive skills through the 3rd grade as having a parent with a college education (Marks & Garcia Coll, 2007). Though the focus of this manuscript was on AIAN youth, the authors showed similar effects for positive attitudes existed for children of other racial/minority backgrounds. In addition, the benefits of a positive attitude appeared more potent than those observed for White children. In another study of early learners, pre-school children in an urban Head Start program who expressed positive approaches to learning (including positive attitudes, task persistence, and competence motivation) were a key component to early academic success (McWayne, Fantuzzo, & McDermott, 2004). School engagement, and its related constructs of school belonging and belief in the utility of school, also are centrally important facilitating mindsets for minority youth. A recent study used the integrative model to demonstrate how school engagement (measured in behavioral, emotional, and cognitive domains), related to several academic achievement variables (Griffin, Cooper, Metzger, Golden, & White, 2017). Similarly, in a sample of over 900 adolescents transitioning from middle to high school, students experiencing higher amounts of ethnic incongruence between the two schools were at higher risk for experiencing lower levels of school belonging over time – a finding particularly true for African American males (Benner & Graham, 2007). This study provides important evidence of the role larger school and district contexts can play in inhibiting the benefits of positive mindsets necessary for minority youth academic success. Such findings are supported by other studies showing that fear of discrimination in a new school context also can inhibit academic success (Chavous, Rivas-Drake, Smalls, Griffin, & Cogburn, 2008). Another prominent set of attitudes that has been found to promote academic achievement has been documented specifically among immigrant youth in a series of findings coined the immigrant paradox. The paradox is a U.S. population phenomenon wherein more recently immigrated children and youth fare better in their developmental competencies or academic pursuits than their more highly acculturated co-ethnic peers, in spite of their more disadvantaged social contexts (see Marks, Ejesi, & Garcia Coll, 2014; Garcia Coll and Marks, 2012). A recent study applied the integrative model to the paradox with Latino adolescent academic attitudes, and found that greater engagement in the family’s cultural values (a construct included in the integrative model) and beliefs such as familismo were supportive of adolescents’ educational values and efforts (Aretakis, Ceballo, Suarez, & Camacho, 2015). Taken together, the articles identified in this literature search indicate that positive attitudes toward school and strong cultural ties and racial/ ethnic identity appear to be vital to many ethnic racial minority youth’s positive academic attainment. Discussion By taking a theoretical lens to the literature on minority youth school experiences and competencies, many advances were noted as directly linked to the 1996 integrative model. Examining closely the Table that captures constructs from the model and the corresponding topics identified in our literature searches, several new research topics have emerged as important (noted in italics in the Table 1). Among these are studies acknowledging the unique social position of LGBTQ youth. Such youth experience many minority-related challenges to their educational success and positive academic experiences because of the discrimination, stigma, and lack of adequate health education relevant to them (see review by Heck, Poteat, & Goodenow, 2016). Such work has called for safespaces, advocacy, and diversity inclusivity work in schools to foster positive academic outcomes among LGBTQ youth (see Cerezo & Bergfeld, 2013). Though the original integrative model was specifically designed for children of color and ethnic/racial minority youth, we note that many of the competency-based, context-related perspectives put forth in the integrative model are highly relevant for work with LGBTQ youth. As such, future education-related theoretical work may consider adapting and expanding upon the integrative model specifically for use with LGBTQ youth. In addition to LGBTQ youth, understanding how rural vs. urban contexts also can serve as social position contexts for minority youth are emerging as well (see for example, Stein, Gonzales, Garcia Coll, & Prandoni, 2016). Approximately 1/3rd of the articles identified in our searches focused on understanding the myriad ways discrimination, racism, prejudice, stereotypes, and oppression directly and indirectly affect minority children’s academic experiences and outcomes. Given this, it was interesting to note that our searches did not yield studies directly focused on segregation’s effects. It may be that most current research in the past two years is focusing on the consequences of segregation (e.g., racism) instead of the impact of segregation itself. Therefore, it may be that segregation – whether through physical or social isolation – may be an under-studied component of the 1996 integrative model. Among the 60% of articles that talked about Promoting/Inhibiting environments, the importance and delineation of how contextual forces operate on minority individuals has brought about a more nuanced understanding of developmental processes and outcomes in these populations. That said, moving forward, researchers need to consider contexts beyond the family and neighborhood – including online and social media contexts. Children and adolescents are particularly immersed in a technological culture that developmental scientists are just beginning to understand (see special issue of Child Development; Yan, 2017). 6
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Within the Adaptive Culture construct from the original model, another major context in need of increased research attention is immigration and refugee contexts. Although a review of the literature specific to immigrant youth educational experiences was beyond the scope of this paper, immigrant youth are highly represented in the U.S. population of ethnic/racial minority youth. Moreover, immigration-related constructs including acculturation, migration histories, and cultural legacies were included in the integrative model, though these constructs are not always investigated with direct reference to the integrative model (see exception by Han, 2006). The integrative model was recently adapted for use with rural immigrant-origin youth (Stein et al., 2016), and a new theoretical model of youth development specifically tailored to immigrant and refugee youth is forthcoming (Suarez-Orozco, MottiStefanidi, Marks, & Katsiaficas, in press). These newly evolved theoretical frameworks will hopefully spawn and inspire new waves of research specifically tailored to the unique developmental contexts of immigrant-origin children and youth. A parallel and robust area of literature examining the educational experiences of immigrant youth has grown in the past several decades, though often this literature does not fully connect to the theoretical approaches developed for studying minority youth specifically. Instead, immigration-related research tends to focus on acculturative and ecological theories adapted specifically for use with immigrant youth (see Suarez-Orozco, Abo-Zena, & Marks, 2015). Clearly, there is a need for more integrative approaches that include immigration-specific contexts with the theoretical perspectives useful for understanding minority youth development (see Suarez-Orozco et al., in press). Contextual characteristics specific to migration, therefore, should be considered more deeply, in the study of minority youth education experiences and outcomes. Legal statuses, push-and-pull migration influences, immigration policies, and many other macro- and micro-level contextual factors play essential roles in shaping the adaptation and developmental outcomes of immigrant-origin children and youth. Moving our discussion now to methodology, assessment strategies that fully consider the unique contexts of ethnic-racial minority youth are still being developed. Researchers need to diversify their methodological toolboxes for capturing ethnicity and race in novel ways that capture nuances important to mixed race families, and incorporate immigration history (Romero, Gonzalez, & Smith, 2014). In addition, although discrimination is a clear theme emerging in research on the academic outcomes and experiences of minority youth, few articles or scholars have incorporated discrimination into assessment strategies for understanding minority youth education outcomes. This seems a glaring oversight, given the central importance of considering discrimination’s effects on school outcomes. A recent systematic review revealed very few assessments of discrimination experiences have been directly developed for and with children (see Marks, et al., 2015). More mixed-methods research approaches would be extremely beneficial in the area of research linking the qualities of students’ discrimination experiences to barriers for actualizing their potential in school. One recent qualitative study, for example, documented the pervasive experiences Mexican-American adolescents have with stereotyping from media and their peers (Romero et al., 2014). Such experiences are currently not adequately captured in measures typically used to quantify perceived discrimination among youth. Also related to the growing area of research on discrimination and its impact on minority youth academic success, future studies should begin using the integrative model to design classroom and school based interventions aimed at improving ethnic minority youth experiences. One such study recently designed an intervention among preschool students aimed at training teachers to improve the classroom learning environment for African American children (Schenke, Nguyen, Watts, Sarama, & Clements, 2017). Intervention effects were found, indicating that it is possible to promote positive learning environments for minority students who may be at greatest risk for challenges in their transition to school. Future intervention efforts aimed at boosting minority children’s coping strategies for dealing with discrimination at school also are needed, in combination with teacher-training to reduce classroom biases (Marks, et al., 2015). Lastly, as Orellana & Bowman argued nearly 15 years ago, social scientists concerned with the educational success of minority youth (or the U.S. school population in general) continue to treat constructs such as race, ethnicity, and SES as fixed and essentialized child characteristics (Orellana & Bowman, 2003). As these and other authors have argued (e.g., Helms, Jernigan, & Mascher, 2005), failing to measure the processes behind broad race or ethnicity-based “effects” observed in education such as the institutional and contextual factors conducive to achievement gaps serves largely to perpetuate deficit models and does not acknowledge the social construction of these constructs and the negative social forces that operate behind them (i.e. prejudice, discrimination, segregation). It is not the particular race/ethnicity group identity that matters, but it is the social credence of value/no value attached to these social categories by powerful institutions and individuals. To address the social construction of race- and ethnicity-based achievement gaps and perceived discrimination in schools, it is imperative that scholars, educators, and practitioners fully embrace a commitment to studying and measuring the psychological and social experiences of members from minority groups (see Johnson et. al, 2003). Though many researchers have taken up these more dimensional and social-constructivist approaches to studying race/ethnicity in childhood and adolescents, the field of education still has a way to go to see these approaches fully recognized in nationally representative studies and the analytic approaches used to study them. This is evidenced by the preponderance of smaller-scale or regional quantitative studies on education that have employed the integrative model in their design. We therefore urge future scholars to take heed of the integrative model and theoretical arguments by the authors cited here when designing future national studies aimed at reducing SES-, race/ethnicity-, and gender-based achievement gaps in youth. References Aretakis, M. T., Ceballo, R., Suarez, G. A., & Camacho, T. C. (2015). Investigating the immigrant paradox and Latino adolescents’ academic attitudes. Journal of Latina/ o Psychology, 3(1), 56–69. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/lat0000031. Benner, A. D., & Graham, S. (2007). Navigating the transition to multi-ethnic urban high schools: Changing ethnic congruence and adolescents school-related affect. Journal of Research on Adolescence, 17(1), 207–220. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1532-7795.2007.00519.x.
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Benner, A. D., & Graham, S. (2011). Latino adolescents’ experiences of discrimination across the first 2 years of high school: Correlates and influences on educational outcomes. Child Development, 82(2), 508–519. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8624.2010.01524.x. Benner, A. D., & Kim, S. Y. (2009). Intergenerational experiences of discrimination in Chinese American families: Influences of socialization and stress. Journal of Marriage and Family, 71(4), 862–877. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1741-3737.2009.00640.x. Bhargava, S., & Witherspoon, D. P. (2015). Parental involvement across middle and high school: Exploring contributions of individual and neighborhood characteristics. Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 44(9), 1702–1719. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10964-015-0334-9. Bradley, R. H., & Corwyn, R. F. (2000). Moderating effect of perceived amount of family conflict on the relation between home environmental processes and the wellbeing of adolescents. Journal of Family Psychology, 14(3), 349–364. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037//0893-3200.14.3.349. Cerezo, A., & Bergfeld, J. (2013). Meaningful LGBTQ inclusion in schools: The importance of diversity representation and counterspaces. Journal of LGBT Issues in Counseling, 7(4), 355–371. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15538605.2013.839341. Chavous, T. M., Rivas-Drake, D., Smalls, C., Griffin, T., & Cogburn, C. (2008). Gender matters, too: The influences of school racial discrimination and racial identity on academic engagement outcomes among African American adolescents. Developmental Psychology, 44(3), 637–654. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0012-1649.44.3. 637. Copeland-Linder, N., Lambert, S. F., Chen, Y., & Ialongo, N. S. (2010). Contextual stress and health risk behaviors among African American adolescents. Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 40(2), 158–173. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10964-010-9520-y. Critchley, J. C., & Trembly, L. J. (2017). Historical review, current status and legal considerations regarding Sanctuary Cities. New Jersey Lawyer, 33. D'hondt, F., Houtte, M., & Stevens, P. A. J. (2015). How does ethnic and non-ethnic victimization by peers and by teachers relate to the school belongingness of ethnic minority students in Flanders, Belgium? An exploratory study. Social Psychology of Education, 18(4), 685–701. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11218-015-9304-z. Eccles, J. S., Wong, C. A., & Peck, S. C. (2006). Ethnicity as a social context for the development of African-American adolescents. Journal of School Psychology, 44(5), 407–426. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jsp.2006.04.001. Fisher, C. B., Wallace, S. A., & Fenton, R. E. (2000). Discrimination distress during adolescence. Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 29, 679–695. http://dx.doi.org/10. 1023/A:1026455906512. Fitzpatrick, C., Côté-Lussier, C., Pagani, L. S., & Blair, C. (2015). I don't think you like me very much: Child minority status and disadvantage predict relationship quality with teachers. Youth & Society, 47(5), 727–743. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0044118X13508962. Garcia Coll, C., Akerman, A., & Cicchetti, D. (2000). Cultural influences on developmental processes and outcomes: Implications for the study of development and psychopathology. Development and Psychopathology, 12, 333–356. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0954579400003059. García Coll, C., Lamberty, G., Jenkins, R., McAdoo, H., Crnic, K., Wasik, B., & García, H. (1996). An integrative model for the study of developmental competencies in minority children. Child Development, 67, 1891–1914. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8624.1996.tb01834.x. Garcia Coll, C., & Marks, A. K. (2012). The immigrant paradox in children and adolescents: Is becoming american a developmental risk? Washington DC: American Psychological Association. Gonzalez, L. M., Stein, G. L., Kiang, L., & Cupito, A. M. (2014). The impact of discrimination and support on developmental competencies in Latino adolescents. Journal of Latina/o Psychology, 2(2), 79–91. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/lat0000014. Griffin, C. B., Cooper, S. M., Metzger, I. W., Golden, A. R., & White, C. N. (2017). School racial climate and the academic achievement of African American high school students: The mediating role of school engagement. Psychology in the Schools, 54(7), 673–688. http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/pits.22026. Han, W. J. (2006). Academic achievements of children in immigrant families. Educational Research and Reviews, 1(8), 286. Harry, B., & Klingner, J. (2007). Discarding the deficit model. Educational Leadership, 64(5), 16. Hatzichristou, C. (1998). Alternative school psychological services: Development of a databased model. School Psychology Review, 27(2), 246–259. Heard, H. E. (2007). The family structure trajectory and adolescent school performance. Journal of Family Issues, 28(3), 319–354. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/ 0192513x06296307. Heck, N. C., Poteat, V. P., & Goodenow, C. (2016). Advances in research with LGBTQ youth in schools. Psychology of Sexual Orientation and Gender Diversity, 3(4), 381–385. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/sgd0000206. Helms, J. E., Jernigan, M., & Mascher, J. (2005). The meaning of race in psychology and how to change it. American Psychologist, 60, 27–36. Iruka, I. U., Gardner-Neblett, N., Matthews, J., & Winn, D. C. (2014). Preschool to kindergarten transition patterns for African American boys. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 29(2), 106–117. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ecresq.2013.11.004. Johnson, D. J., Jaeger, E., Randolph, S. M., Cauce, A. M., & Ward, J. (2003). Studying the effects of early child care experiences on the development of children of color in the United States: Toward a more inclusive research Agenda. Child Development, 74(5), 1227–1244. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1467-8624.00604. Kurtz-Costes, B., Swinton, A. D., & Skinner, O. D. (2014). Racial and ethnic gaps in the school performance of Latino, African American and White students. APA Handbook of Multicultural Psychology: Theory and Research, 1, 231–246. Lowe, K., & Dotterer, A. M. (2013). Parental monitoring, parental warmth, and minority youths' academic outcomes: Exploring the integrative model of parenting. Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 42(9), 1413–1425. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/t63751-000. Marks, A. K., Ejesi, K., & Garcia Coll, C. (2014). The U.S. immigrant paradox in childhood and adolescence. Child Development Perspectives, 8(2), 59–64. http://dx.doi. org/10.1111/cdep.12071. Marks, A. K., Ejesi, K., McCullough, M., & Garcia Coll, C. (2015). The development and implications of racism and discrimination. In M. Lamb, C. Garcia Coll, & R. Lerner (Eds.). Handbook of child psychology and developmental science, seventh edition, volume three: Socioemotional processesNew Jersey: John Wiley & Sons ISBN: 978-1-118-13679-9. Marks, A. K., & Garcia Coll, C. (2007). Psychological and demographic correlates of early academic skill development among American Indian and Alaska Native youth: A growth modeling study. Developmental Psychology, 43(3), 663–674. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0012-1649.43.3.663. Marks, A. K., Godoy, C. M., & Garcia Coll, C. (2013). An ecological approach to understanding immigrant child and adolescent developmental competencies. In L. Gershoff, R. Mistry, & D. Crosby (Eds.). The contexts of child development (pp. 75–89). New York: Oxford University Press. Marks, A. K., Seaboyer, L., & Garcia Coll, C. (2015). The academic achievement of U.S. immigrant children and adolescents. In C. Suarez-Orozco, M. Abo-Zena, & A. K. Marks (Eds.). Transitions: The development of children of immigrants (pp. 259–275). New York: NYU Press. Marotz-Baden, R., Adams, G. R., Bueche, B. M., & Munro, G. (1979). Family form or family process? Reconsidering the deficit family model approach. The Family Coordinator, 28(1), 5–14. http://dx.doi.org.ezproxysuf.flo.org/10.2307/583262. Masten, A. S., & Coatsworth, J. D. (1998). The development of competence in favorable and unfavorable environments: Lessons from research on successful children. American Psychologist, 53(2), 205–220. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.53.2.205. McWayne, C. M., Fantuzzo, J. W., & McDermott, P. A. (2004). Preschool competency in context: An investigation of the unique contribution of child competencies to early academic success. Developmental Psychology, 40(4), 633–645. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0012-1649.40.4.633. Musu-Gillette, L., Robinson, J., McFarland, J., KewalRamani, A., Zhang, A., & Wilkinson-Flicker, S. (2016). Status and trends in the education of racial and ethnic groups 2016. NCES 2016-007. National Center for Education Statistics. National Center for Education Statistics, (2017). Racial/ethnic enrollment in public schools. Retrieved 9/22/2017, from < https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/ indicator_cge.asp > . Neblett, E. W., Philip, C. L., Cogburn, C. D., & Sellers, R. M. (2006). African American Adolescents’ discrimination experiences and academic achievement: Racial socialization as a cultural compensatory and protective factor. Journal of Black Psychology, 32(2), 199–218. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0095798406287072. Nichols, T. M., Kotchick, B. A., Barry, C. M., & Haskins, D. G. (2009). Understanding the educational aspirations of African American adolescents: Child, family, and community factors. Journal of Black Psychology, 36(1), 25–48. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0095798409344084. Orellana, M. F., & Bowman, P. (2003). Cultural diversity research on learning and development: Conceptual, methodological, and strategic considerations. Educational Researcher, 32(5), 26–32. http://dx.doi.org/10.3102/0013189x032005026. Romero, A. J., Gonzalez, H., & Smith, B. A. (2014). Qualitative exploration of adolescent discrimination: Experiences and responses of Mexican-American parents and teens. Journal of Child and Family Studies, 24(6), 1531–1543. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10826-014-9957-9.
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Schenke, K., Nguyen, T., Watts, T. W., Sarama, J., & Clements, D. H. (2017). Differential effects of the classroom on African American and Non-African American’s mathematics achievement. Journal of Educational Psychology, 109(6), 794–811. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/edu0000165. Seyfried, S. F. (1998). Academic achievement of African American preadolescents: The influence of teacher perceptions. American Journal of Community Psychology, 26(3), 381–402. http://dx.doi.org/10.1023/a:1022107120472. Sibley, E., & Brabeck, K. (2017). Latino immigrant students' school experiences in the United States: The importance of family–school–community collaborations. School Community Journal, 27(1), 137–157. Smalls, C., White, R., Chavous, T., & Sellers, R. (2007). Racial ideological beliefs and racial discrimination experiences as predictors of academic engagement among African American adolescents. Journal of Black Psychology, 33(3), 299–330. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0095798407302541. Smith, E. P., Prinz, R. J., Dumas, J. E., & Laughlin, J. (2001). Latent models of family processes in African American families: Relationships to child competence, achievement, and problem behavior. Journal of Marriage and Family, 63(4), 967–980. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1741-3737.2001.00967.x. Spilt, J. L., & Hughes, J. N. (2015). African American children at risk of increasingly conflicted teacher-student relationships in elementary school. School Psychology Review, 44(3), 306–314. http://dx.doi.org/10.17105/spr-14-0033.1. Stein, G. L., Gonzales, R. G., Garcia Coll, C., & Prandoni, J. I. (2016). Latinos in rural, new immigrant destinations: A modification of the integrative model of child development. In L. J. Crockett, & C. Gustavo (Eds.). Rural ethnic minority youth and families in the United States (pp. 37–56). Switzerland: Springer International Publishing. Suarez-Orozco, C., Abo-Zena, M., & Marks, A. K. (2015). Transitions: The Development of Immigrant Children. New York: NYU Press. Suarez-Orozco, C., Motti-Stefanidi, F., Marks, A. K., & Katsiaficas, D. (in press). An integrative risk and resilience model for understanding the development and adaptation of immigrant origin children and youth. American Psychologist. Suizzo, M., & Stapleton, L. M. (2007). Home-based parental involvement in Young Children’s education: Examining the effects of maternal education across U.S. ethnic groups. Educational Psychology, 27(4), 533–556. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01443410601159936. Willson, V. L., & Hughes, J. N. (2006). Retention of Hispanic/Latino students in first grade: Child, parent, teacher, school, and peer predictors. Journal of School Psychology, 44(1), 31–49. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jsp.2005.12.001. Wong, C. A., Eccles, J., & Sameroff, A. J. (2003). The influence of ethnic discrimination and ethnic identification on African American adolescents’ school and socioemotional adjustment. Journal of Personality, 71, 1197–1232. Yan, Z. (2017). Child and adolescent use of mobile phones: An unparalleled complex developmental phenomenon. Child Development. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/cdev. 12821.
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Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Developmental Review journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/dr
Education and developmental competencies of ethnic minority children: Recent theoretical and methodological advances ⁎
Amy K. Marksa, , Cynthia Garcia Collb a b
Suffolk University, Boston, MA, United States Carlos Albizu University, PR, United States
A R T IC LE I N F O
ABS TRA CT
Keywords: Education Competency Academic Success Minority Theoretical
In 1996, Garcia Coll and colleagues published a theoretical article detailing the many ways an integrative approach to studying minority child development is necessary. Advances in theory and methods since have pushed forward our thinking about how minority youth develop and achieve educational success in school contexts. This paper reviews research and theory since the 1996 article on ethnic minority children and adolescents in the US school system, attending to how empirical evidence and methods have supported the integrative model. Ethnic minority children’s competencies are emphasized. We also highlight areas of growth needed in this research subfield, as well as specific ideas for using mixed-methodologies in the study of ethnic minority children. Particular attention is paid to the unique developmental competencies ethnic and racial minority youth must develop in order to be successful in the US school system, and implications for policy and practice are discussed.
Introduction Understanding the educational experiences of and achievement patterns among ethnic and racial minority children is increasingly vital to the future stability, productivity, and health of the U.S. In the U.S., ethnic and racial minority1 children make up roughly half of the public school-aged population; by 2026, the proportion of ethnic and racial minority children enrolled in public primary and secondary schools is expected to climb to 55% (NCES, 2017). These demographic changes were driven largely by migration, bringing diversification to the U.S. school population in terms of ethnic/racial composition, as well as languages spoken, religiosity, and other cultural practice domains. With global migration on the rise, particularly for youth populations, it is likely the U.S. child population will continue to diversify in these ways (see article by Marks, Seaboyer, & Garcia Coll, 2015 for a review of immigration and education in the U.S.). Approximately 20 years ago, García Coll and colleagues introduced a theoretical framework to guide researchers, educators, practitioners, and policy makers in understanding the developmental experiences and outcomes of ethnic/racial minority youth (García Coll et al., 1996). This framework took an ecological approach, acknowledging macro- and micro-systemic influences on minority children’s development. According to the model, ethnic/racial minority children’s development must be considered first in terms of the social position variables a child is born into (e.g., race, social class, ethnicity, and gender), as well as environmental forces and practices of racism, prejudice, discrimination, oppression, and segregation. In particular, the authors highlighted the ⁎
Corresponding author at: 73 Tremont Street, Psychology Department, Suffolk University, Boston, MA, United States. E-mail address: akmarks@suffolk.edu (A.K. Marks). 1 The word minority is used in this manuscript to describe relative social, economic, or political power. It does not necessarily refer to a group or individual member of a group that is small in number. For example, women are a slight majority of the U.S. population, but are considered a gender minority group due to their lower social and economic power when compared to men. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dr.2018.05.004 Received 31 October 2017; Received in revised form 6 May 2018 0273-2297/ © 2018 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Please cite this article as: Marks, A.K., Developmental Review (2018), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dr.2018.05.004
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Fig. 1. Integrative model for the study of developmental competencies in minority children.
unique inhibiting and promoting environments that influence how children of color might fare academically (see Fig. 1), including contextual influences from schools, neighborhoods, and health care settings. The roles of promoting/inhibiting environments are to either enhance or mitigate the effects of social position variables and oppressive social forces on the particular child or group, shaping how children and families adapt and respond developmentally to these pressures. For example, in order to understand the academic achievement outcomes of a second-grade Latina student at a middle-class public school, we must first acknowledge the social positionality of her own social class, her ethnicity and race, and her gender, as each may be prone to varied forces of racism, prejudice, discrimination, and oppression, depending on where she lives. These forces, very importantly, influence her both directly and indirectly through the experiences of her family and herself as members of communities, schools, work places, health care systems, and similar contexts. Ultimately, her school and neighborhood will serve as important places that could either promote larger societal stereotypes and oppressive policies, or provide protection against them and promote alternative adaptations. Such situations are playing-out today in the U.S., as some U.S. cities defend their immigrant citizens by declaring themselves as “sanctuary cities,” offering protections to citizens from unlawful entry and police searches that could lead to deportation (Critchley & Trembly, 2017). These cities stand in contrast to others which use aggressive policing among their immigrant communities (e.g., Supreme Court vs. Arizona, Critchley & Trembly, 2017, p. 35). Coming after a history of ‘deficit models’ in research by which minority children consistently appear to underachieve compared to their majority peers, this integrative, contextualized model provided a new way of viewing and understanding the ethnic/racial achievement gaps that continue to pervade our educational system (Harry & Klingner, 2007). Deficit models are built when children's outcomes are measured without taking into account contextual, interactional, and systemic factors that would disproportionately, negatively affect one group of children more than another (see Marotz-Baden, Adams, Bueche, & Munro, 1979; Garcia Coll, Akerman, & Cicchetti, 2000). The myriad of national U.S. studies since the 1970s that have pointed to achievement gaps in public school outcomes are one example (Kurtz-Costes, Swinton, & Skinner, 2014). In these studies, white children consistently appear to outperform children of color, sometimes by as much as 30 points on standardized exams (Musu-Gillette et al., 2016). According to the integrative model, these findings would not be surprising, if the forces of segregation, oppression, economic injustice, and racism could be fully accounted for. Further, if we as researchers do not fully consider these essential contextual forces, we run the risk of building a scientific base of information that leads to the conclusion that children of color are not as smart as (or more impulsive or less regulated than, etc.) White children. In this analysis, it is the individual child, family, or group that is not “achieving, behaving”, etc., like a norm (implicitly, a white majority), for reasons attributed intrinsically to the individual, the family, and the group. It is essential, in contrast, that researchers not only attend to the precipitating social, political, and economic forces shaping minority children’s family, school and community experiences, but also actively seek to understand and document their adaptations, resiliency, and many competencies forged in spite of such systemic failures on their behalf. The current review took two approaches to understand the impact of the original 1996 Integrative Model on the recent corpus of education-related research. The first approach identified studies published in 1997 or thereafter that directly cited the original paper. 2
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The second approach combined a variety of key terms used in the Integrative Model to examine main topic areas of research studies starting in 1997. Though these papers did not specifically cite the model per se, examining their contents allows us to understand the newer, related ideas of study which can be used both to update the original model, as well as characterize future directions of research that appear to be emerging. The methods for the reviews, as well as the results of the content analysis of articles are presented below. These are followed by a summary of the themes as they map onto the original model, ending with ideas for future studies while highlighting the new areas that have emerged in the field since the original 1996 model was published.
Review methods The goal of this paper is to summarize advances that have been made in the cultural developmental science of academic achievement among students of color and other minority youth since the 1996 García Coll and colleagues’ model was published. To this end, we conducted two literature searches to identify papers that had either explicitly used the integrative model in empirical research or to further advance theoretical positions or frameworks relevant to education with minority youth, or used terminology emphasized by the model (but did not directly cite the model) in the conceptualization of their studies. Our timeframe for both the broader search and for articles specifically citing the Garcia Coll et al. paper for publication year was 1997–2017, spanning about 20 years of scholarship. We also included articles published in English, and articles that were peer-reviewed. To identify studies that specifically referenced the original model, we used Google scholar. We also used ERIC and Web of Science to combine search terms in the psychological and educational peer-reviewed literature data bases, filtering papers again for citation of the original 1996 paper. The following Boolean statement was used in these searches: (integrative model OR context OR competency OR strengths OR positive) AND (minority) AND (academic OR education OR school). The more comprehensive search included a similar Boolean statement as above, but without the use of the “integrative model” phrase or restricting results to citing the original 1996 paper. The rationale for searching in this way was to cast a broad net for studies which might have used the competency-based lens on minority youth educational experiences and outcomes, while leaving room for new topics which were not included in the original 1996 model to emerge. We sought articles that fulfilled the spirit of the 1996 integrative model by including at least one outcome or developmental process related to competency, positive development, or resilience in education. This search methodology was not intended to be fully systematic, but it was rather targeted to the peerreviewed empirical or theoretical journal article literature base to examine how the integrative model has been applied to or inspired research and theory on educational competencies among minority youth. The search strategy was suited to the purpose of documenting broad themes in the peer-reviewed literature, and revealing areas for future development and application of the model.
Results of reviews A total of 4,062 peer-reviewed journal articles were identified using the broader search strategy outlined above. The number of articles matching our search term criteria increased steadily over time; from 1997 to 2002 there were 343 articles identified in the search. During the last 5 years from 2012 to 2017, there were 2,015. After eliminating articles addressing adult education outcomes (including a large subset of articles about medical education), over 1,000 articles remained. Examining titles and abstracts from the past year alone, a great diversity of topics were covered in this large research base. We retained the most recent 200 articles to move forward with establishing current content trends in the field with respect to topics related to the original 1996 integrative model. Next, a subset of 45 articles was identified from our larger search from 1997 to 2017 as explicitly referencing the original Integrative Model paper. Examining these articles’ publication dates revealed a clear peak during the years 2005–2008 for studies published specifically referencing the integrative model in education-related minority youth research or theory. Although some of the initial papers published after the model were theoretical in nature (e.g., applying the model to specific contexts such as school counseling or childcare systems for minority youth, e.g., Hatzichristou, 1998, and Johnson, Jaeger, Randolph, Cauce, & Ward, 2003, respectively), the majority of research following the integrative framework has been empirical and quantitative. From the two searches combined, articles covered education-related experiences and outcomes from preschool through emerging adulthood, though the early childhood (Kindergarten and early elementary school) and adolescent periods were the two most common developmental periods in which the integrative model was explicitly applied. As noted above, a wide variety of topics were covered in these studies. These topic areas were counted across studies and their relative frequency among the larger group was calculated. This information is presented in Table 1, grouped by the topics’ correspondence to the main constructs presented in the original 1996 model. Examining the Table reveals a heavy emphasis on studies that examined social position variables and promoting/inhibiting environments as a main goal. Approximately 50% of the papers identified also emphasized education-related outcomes; the others sought to characterize school-related experiences or processes in some way. Research topics that emerged from our content analysis that were not explicitly emphasized in the original 1996 paper are included in this table in italics. Though most research was conducted in the U.S., several papers from scholars in Europe were conducting work aligned with the 1996 model as well (e.g., a paper examining how ethnic and non-ethnic victimization by peers relates to school belonging, D’hondt, Houtte, & Stevens, 2015). With this broad overview in mind, we present the following themes and examples of lessons learned from taking the integrative lens to understand minority youth educational experiences, competencies, and outcomes identified from the two searches above.
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Contextual influences on academic outcomes: Promoting/Inhibiting Environments, Family, and Adaptive Culture Focusing specifically on the research examining academic processes and school outcomes, many scholars used the integrative model to support their investigations of contextual influences on ethnic/racial minority youth competency development in school (e.g., Masten & Coatsworth, 1998). Clear advances in cultural developmental approaches to understanding ethnic minority youth education emphasized the importance of family, school, and neighborhood contexts on promoting positive academic attitudes. Importantly, the most recent research in ethnic minority youth competencies clearly demonstrates the interconnectedness of family, school, and neighborhood effects as inhibitors or promotors of child and adolescent academic success over time (e.g., Bhargava & Witherspoon, 2015; Sibley & Brabeck, 2017). Though these constructs were separated in the original 1996 model, recent studies are bringing them together in unique ways. Family contextual influences are measured in many ways, including family structural variables (e.g., family size and composition), resources (e.g., maternal education, home resources such as books and computers), and practices (e.g., facilitating homework, fostering positive attitudes toward learning, positive parenting practices and teacher alliances). Families in our review were portrayed as facilitating school success through promoting resources at home and maintaining low conflict (Bradley & Corwyn, 2000), and by promoting emotional support (Iruka, Gardner-Neblett, Matthews, & Winn, 2014). For example, in a prevention-intervention study, higher levels of family support and organization were related to parent and teacher rated child academic competency among African American families with children in kindergarten (Smith, Prinz, Dumas, & Laughlin, 2001). Families can also play an inhibiting role in children’s schooling as well. In a study of Hispanic kindergarteners, approximately 20% of students were not promoted to 1st grade (Willson & Hughes, 2006). One of the predictors of retention was parents’ low reported perceived responsibility for their children’s success; poor teacher-student relationships also significantly predicted retention in this study as well. It is important to note that the effects of family resources and processes on minority youth outcomes vary both by ethnic/racial group, as well as by family structural composition (e.g., Heard, 2007; Suizzo & Stapleton, 2007). For example, Heard found that having a recent family change such as living with a new caregiver leads to a sharper drop in GPA when compared with Latinx youth. Further, for most minority youth in the study, negative academic effects of family structure (such as living with a single parent) could be attenuated by race-specific social supports (Heard, 2007). It appears from such studies that we are now moving beyond using broad demographic categories as explanatory constructs, and moving into the specification of more nuanced contextual processes. In the school context itself, teachers and peers alike played important roles in shaping minority students’ experiences. The school context can serve as either an inhibiting or promoting environment, based on its characteristics and their interactions with the child and family’s characteristics. In one study, a meaningful portion of African American students’ GPAs could be explained by having a positive family environment and positive teacher perceptions of students’ social skills and academic ability (Seyfried, 1998). Among American Indian and Alaska Native children, teacher-rated positive attitudes toward learning were associated with better cognitive skill development in the first 3 years of elementary school (Marks & Garcia Coll, 2007). In another study, whether Latino adolescents’ perceived discrimination experiences impacted their achievement in school was dependent on whether adolescents’ perceived their school climate as supportive or not (Benner & Graham, 2011). Peer and adult support in school also has been shown to mitigate the effects of discrimination on students’ self-efficacy, school belonging, and depressive symptoms as well (Gonzalez, Stein, Kiang, & Cupito, 2014). Unfortunately, many of the negative, inhibiting effects of teacher-student conflict appear to be particularly threatening to minority youth. In a recent study with young African American children in elementary school, African American ethnicity (and not SES or IQ) was uniquely associated with increasing conflict in student-teacher relationship quality over time (Split & Hughes, 2015). Studies such as these continue to point to the necessity for using minority-specific theoretical models to guide the research of education experiences of minority youth in the U.S. Though fewer studies have examined multi-contextual influences on ethnic/racial minority youth academic outcomes within the same study, evidence exists showing that proximal contexts (e.g., individual and family) are potently tied more directly to academic outcomes than more distal contexts (e.g., neighborhood, see Marks, Godoy, & Garcia Coll, 2013). That said, neighborhood characteristics are extremely important when considering interventions, as they appear to play a more indirect role in shaping students’ academic outcomes. In one study, the number of community resources accessed by African American adolescents was significantly related to higher levels of school aspiration (Nichols, Kotchick, Barry, & Haskins, 2009), a construct widely shown in the literature to be linked with student academic success. In another study of neighborhood contexts, researchers measured contextual stress stemming from community violence and experiences with racial discrimination (Copeland-Linder, Lambert, Chen, & Ialongo, 2010). The African American adolescents in this study who reported higher levels of contextual stress were more likely to struggle with substance use and behavior problems two years later. These effects were mitigated by feelings of self-worth and beliefs in one’s own academic competency – again implicating neighborhood contextual stressors as indirect inhibitors of school success, and supporting the vital importance of individual-level child competencies and positive mindsets for academic achievement (see theme on academic mindset below). Discrimination’s impact on academic experiences and outcomes Discrimination – which appears as a centrally important component of the integrative model’s approach to understanding minority youth development – became an increasingly studied topic in the literature over the past decade. About 1/3rd of the studies examined in this review covered topics related to discrimination, racism, stereotypes, and other related social oppression (see Table 1). One study noted that 32% of African-American 38% of Latinx, and 13% of Caucasian students had been discouraged from 4
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Table 1 Main topics found among the 200 most recent education-focused empirical literature related to the Integrative Model. Construct from the model
Prevalence
Specific topics studied
(1) Social position variables Race/ethnicity Social class Gender (2) Racism/Prejudice/Discrimination/ Oppression (3) Segregation (4) Promoting/Inhibiting Environments
65% 50% 10% 5% 35%
LGBTQ youth positionality; rural-urban effects; immigration or legal status Race/ethnicity; culture of origin (immigrant youth) Low-income; poverty Female/male effects Discrimination (many forms); marginalization/social exclusion; isolation; stereotypes; intergroup processes; minority stress model
0% 60%
Schools
35%
Neighborhoods Health care
10% 15%
(5) (6) (7) (8)
Adaptive Culture Child Characteristics Family Developmental Competencies: Academic
15% 20% 15% 50%
Social networking; peer environments; academic social support from larger community/mentors; interventions Ethnic school composition; school climate; school structure; school belonging; teacher characteristics; school discipline; mentor/advisor access and characteristics; bullying Community-based policy; community characteristics; exposure to conflict/violence/abuse Inclusivity/access to services for minority youth (includes counseling services in schools; disabilities); mental health Acculturation; bilingualism; civic engagement; advocacy/social justice Health (e.g., obesity); Self-efficacy; self-compassion & affirmation; sexuality; identities Positive parenting; parent involvement; parent-teacher relations Student engagement & attitudes; achievement; math/STEM outcomes; gifted students/high-potential students of color; academic help-seeking behavior
Notes: Numbered constructs correspond to the original Figure from the Integrative model; percentages rounded to the nearest 5%; Specific topics in italics are newer to the literature/not specifically included in the original Integrative Model.
joining advanced level classes, were disciplined wrongly by teachers, or were graded unfairly because of their race (Fisher, Wallace, & Fenton, 2000). A recent systematic review of the effects of discrimination on child development revealed a spike in discriminationrelated developmental research post 9–11, 2001 (Marks, Ejesi, McCullough, & Garcia Coll, 2015). A similar increase in the literature tied to the integrative model was observed in our analyses for this paper as well; by 2005, the number of articles addressing discrimination in school and other educational settings in the U.S. increased notably. Among these articles, as was also observed in the literature review cited above, several themes could be observed. Predominantly, children perceive discrimination from both peers and teachers in the school context, with teachers often reported as the most potent source of detrimental effects to children’s future academic attainment (Marks, et al., 2015). For example, one study documented how children’s minority status and socioeconomic disadvantage – two important social position variables noted in the 1996 model – predict children’s relationship quality with their teachers (Fitzpatrick, Côté-Lussier, Pagani, & Blair, 2015). This study, conducted in Canada, noted that even controlling for past academic performance, “visible minority” children and children with socioeconomic disadvantage were 50% and 35% less likely to report positive relationships with teachers, respectively. The general effects of discrimination on academic-related outcomes are many, with complex social nuances needed to understand the fullness of this deep societal problem in education. In a study of ideological approaches to understanding one’s ethnic/racial identity and its relations to discrimination and school outcomes, U.S. adolescents who believed they should be more like White students in their schooling also showed lower persistence in their educational pursuits, as well as more behavioral problems in response to discrimination (Smalls, White, Chavous, & Sellers, 2007). One longitudinal study examined the effects of perceived racial discrimination from teachers and peers among African American 7th graders. In both peer and teacher domains, increases in perceived discrimination predicted drops in grades, children’s lower academic self-concept, and threats to several other markers of wellbeing and resilience (Wong, Eccles, & Sameroff, 2003). Taking a competency orientation, these authors also identified that having a positive connection to a racial/ethnic group served as a buffer against the negative effects of perceived discrimination. In another study, clear evidence was found again for the mediating effect of having a positive connection to one’s ethnic/racial group for reducing the effects of discrimination on academic outcomes among African American adolescents (Eccles, Wong, & Peck, 2006). These findings, taken together, provide some empirical support for the integrative model – both in the potential for discrimination to harm a child’s academic success, as well as the power of positive ethnic/racial identity development to buffer these effects and promote resiliency. The literature base remains mixed, however, in whether and how parent socialization may be able to mitigate the effects of discrimination on academic outcomes. For example, in another study, African American adolescents who perceived discrimination were more likely to suffer in academic curiosity, persistence, and grades (Neblett, Philip, Cogburn, & Sellers, 2006). Although racial socialization from family also was related to their academic outcomes, these practices did not appear to ameliorate the effects of discrimination on students’ outcomes. In another study, Chinese American parents’ own experiences with discrimination increased their adolescents’ perceptions of perpetual foreigner stress, which in turn lowered adolescents’ attitudes toward their education (Benner & Kim, 2009). Taken together, these studies depict a complex picture of how discrimination affects family systems, in turn both promoting and inhibiting minority children’s successful adaptations in their educational pursuits.
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Child Characteristics & Adaptive Culture: School belonging, engagement, and positive mindsets as important mechanisms for minority youth success The call of the integrative model to focus on children’s competencies has inspired many studies documenting various types of resources and resiliency profiles among minority youth. Among these have surfaced the powerful effects of positive mindsets and academic aspirations, as well as markers of school belonging, engagement, and related constructs for promoting minority youth academic success. In one study, greater maternal warmth facilitated ethnic/racial minority adolescents’ academic engagement and motivation (Lowe & Dotterer, 2013). For children at the earliest stages of their schooling, having positive attitudes toward learning appear to be a vital asset for minority youth. In one nationally-representative longitudinal study of American Indian and Alaska Native (AIAN) children, kindergartener’s teacher-rated positive attitudes were as powerful at predicting gains in math and readingrelated cognitive skills through the 3rd grade as having a parent with a college education (Marks & Garcia Coll, 2007). Though the focus of this manuscript was on AIAN youth, the authors showed similar effects for positive attitudes existed for children of other racial/minority backgrounds. In addition, the benefits of a positive attitude appeared more potent than those observed for White children. In another study of early learners, pre-school children in an urban Head Start program who expressed positive approaches to learning (including positive attitudes, task persistence, and competence motivation) were a key component to early academic success (McWayne, Fantuzzo, & McDermott, 2004). School engagement, and its related constructs of school belonging and belief in the utility of school, also are centrally important facilitating mindsets for minority youth. A recent study used the integrative model to demonstrate how school engagement (measured in behavioral, emotional, and cognitive domains), related to several academic achievement variables (Griffin, Cooper, Metzger, Golden, & White, 2017). Similarly, in a sample of over 900 adolescents transitioning from middle to high school, students experiencing higher amounts of ethnic incongruence between the two schools were at higher risk for experiencing lower levels of school belonging over time – a finding particularly true for African American males (Benner & Graham, 2007). This study provides important evidence of the role larger school and district contexts can play in inhibiting the benefits of positive mindsets necessary for minority youth academic success. Such findings are supported by other studies showing that fear of discrimination in a new school context also can inhibit academic success (Chavous, Rivas-Drake, Smalls, Griffin, & Cogburn, 2008). Another prominent set of attitudes that has been found to promote academic achievement has been documented specifically among immigrant youth in a series of findings coined the immigrant paradox. The paradox is a U.S. population phenomenon wherein more recently immigrated children and youth fare better in their developmental competencies or academic pursuits than their more highly acculturated co-ethnic peers, in spite of their more disadvantaged social contexts (see Marks, Ejesi, & Garcia Coll, 2014; Garcia Coll and Marks, 2012). A recent study applied the integrative model to the paradox with Latino adolescent academic attitudes, and found that greater engagement in the family’s cultural values (a construct included in the integrative model) and beliefs such as familismo were supportive of adolescents’ educational values and efforts (Aretakis, Ceballo, Suarez, & Camacho, 2015). Taken together, the articles identified in this literature search indicate that positive attitudes toward school and strong cultural ties and racial/ ethnic identity appear to be vital to many ethnic racial minority youth’s positive academic attainment. Discussion By taking a theoretical lens to the literature on minority youth school experiences and competencies, many advances were noted as directly linked to the 1996 integrative model. Examining closely the Table that captures constructs from the model and the corresponding topics identified in our literature searches, several new research topics have emerged as important (noted in italics in the Table 1). Among these are studies acknowledging the unique social position of LGBTQ youth. Such youth experience many minority-related challenges to their educational success and positive academic experiences because of the discrimination, stigma, and lack of adequate health education relevant to them (see review by Heck, Poteat, & Goodenow, 2016). Such work has called for safespaces, advocacy, and diversity inclusivity work in schools to foster positive academic outcomes among LGBTQ youth (see Cerezo & Bergfeld, 2013). Though the original integrative model was specifically designed for children of color and ethnic/racial minority youth, we note that many of the competency-based, context-related perspectives put forth in the integrative model are highly relevant for work with LGBTQ youth. As such, future education-related theoretical work may consider adapting and expanding upon the integrative model specifically for use with LGBTQ youth. In addition to LGBTQ youth, understanding how rural vs. urban contexts also can serve as social position contexts for minority youth are emerging as well (see for example, Stein, Gonzales, Garcia Coll, & Prandoni, 2016). Approximately 1/3rd of the articles identified in our searches focused on understanding the myriad ways discrimination, racism, prejudice, stereotypes, and oppression directly and indirectly affect minority children’s academic experiences and outcomes. Given this, it was interesting to note that our searches did not yield studies directly focused on segregation’s effects. It may be that most current research in the past two years is focusing on the consequences of segregation (e.g., racism) instead of the impact of segregation itself. Therefore, it may be that segregation – whether through physical or social isolation – may be an under-studied component of the 1996 integrative model. Among the 60% of articles that talked about Promoting/Inhibiting environments, the importance and delineation of how contextual forces operate on minority individuals has brought about a more nuanced understanding of developmental processes and outcomes in these populations. That said, moving forward, researchers need to consider contexts beyond the family and neighborhood – including online and social media contexts. Children and adolescents are particularly immersed in a technological culture that developmental scientists are just beginning to understand (see special issue of Child Development; Yan, 2017). 6
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Within the Adaptive Culture construct from the original model, another major context in need of increased research attention is immigration and refugee contexts. Although a review of the literature specific to immigrant youth educational experiences was beyond the scope of this paper, immigrant youth are highly represented in the U.S. population of ethnic/racial minority youth. Moreover, immigration-related constructs including acculturation, migration histories, and cultural legacies were included in the integrative model, though these constructs are not always investigated with direct reference to the integrative model (see exception by Han, 2006). The integrative model was recently adapted for use with rural immigrant-origin youth (Stein et al., 2016), and a new theoretical model of youth development specifically tailored to immigrant and refugee youth is forthcoming (Suarez-Orozco, MottiStefanidi, Marks, & Katsiaficas, in press). These newly evolved theoretical frameworks will hopefully spawn and inspire new waves of research specifically tailored to the unique developmental contexts of immigrant-origin children and youth. A parallel and robust area of literature examining the educational experiences of immigrant youth has grown in the past several decades, though often this literature does not fully connect to the theoretical approaches developed for studying minority youth specifically. Instead, immigration-related research tends to focus on acculturative and ecological theories adapted specifically for use with immigrant youth (see Suarez-Orozco, Abo-Zena, & Marks, 2015). Clearly, there is a need for more integrative approaches that include immigration-specific contexts with the theoretical perspectives useful for understanding minority youth development (see Suarez-Orozco et al., in press). Contextual characteristics specific to migration, therefore, should be considered more deeply, in the study of minority youth education experiences and outcomes. Legal statuses, push-and-pull migration influences, immigration policies, and many other macro- and micro-level contextual factors play essential roles in shaping the adaptation and developmental outcomes of immigrant-origin children and youth. Moving our discussion now to methodology, assessment strategies that fully consider the unique contexts of ethnic-racial minority youth are still being developed. Researchers need to diversify their methodological toolboxes for capturing ethnicity and race in novel ways that capture nuances important to mixed race families, and incorporate immigration history (Romero, Gonzalez, & Smith, 2014). In addition, although discrimination is a clear theme emerging in research on the academic outcomes and experiences of minority youth, few articles or scholars have incorporated discrimination into assessment strategies for understanding minority youth education outcomes. This seems a glaring oversight, given the central importance of considering discrimination’s effects on school outcomes. A recent systematic review revealed very few assessments of discrimination experiences have been directly developed for and with children (see Marks, et al., 2015). More mixed-methods research approaches would be extremely beneficial in the area of research linking the qualities of students’ discrimination experiences to barriers for actualizing their potential in school. One recent qualitative study, for example, documented the pervasive experiences Mexican-American adolescents have with stereotyping from media and their peers (Romero et al., 2014). Such experiences are currently not adequately captured in measures typically used to quantify perceived discrimination among youth. Also related to the growing area of research on discrimination and its impact on minority youth academic success, future studies should begin using the integrative model to design classroom and school based interventions aimed at improving ethnic minority youth experiences. One such study recently designed an intervention among preschool students aimed at training teachers to improve the classroom learning environment for African American children (Schenke, Nguyen, Watts, Sarama, & Clements, 2017). Intervention effects were found, indicating that it is possible to promote positive learning environments for minority students who may be at greatest risk for challenges in their transition to school. Future intervention efforts aimed at boosting minority children’s coping strategies for dealing with discrimination at school also are needed, in combination with teacher-training to reduce classroom biases (Marks, et al., 2015). Lastly, as Orellana & Bowman argued nearly 15 years ago, social scientists concerned with the educational success of minority youth (or the U.S. school population in general) continue to treat constructs such as race, ethnicity, and SES as fixed and essentialized child characteristics (Orellana & Bowman, 2003). As these and other authors have argued (e.g., Helms, Jernigan, & Mascher, 2005), failing to measure the processes behind broad race or ethnicity-based “effects” observed in education such as the institutional and contextual factors conducive to achievement gaps serves largely to perpetuate deficit models and does not acknowledge the social construction of these constructs and the negative social forces that operate behind them (i.e. prejudice, discrimination, segregation). It is not the particular race/ethnicity group identity that matters, but it is the social credence of value/no value attached to these social categories by powerful institutions and individuals. To address the social construction of race- and ethnicity-based achievement gaps and perceived discrimination in schools, it is imperative that scholars, educators, and practitioners fully embrace a commitment to studying and measuring the psychological and social experiences of members from minority groups (see Johnson et. al, 2003). Though many researchers have taken up these more dimensional and social-constructivist approaches to studying race/ethnicity in childhood and adolescents, the field of education still has a way to go to see these approaches fully recognized in nationally representative studies and the analytic approaches used to study them. This is evidenced by the preponderance of smaller-scale or regional quantitative studies on education that have employed the integrative model in their design. We therefore urge future scholars to take heed of the integrative model and theoretical arguments by the authors cited here when designing future national studies aimed at reducing SES-, race/ethnicity-, and gender-based achievement gaps in youth. References Aretakis, M. T., Ceballo, R., Suarez, G. A., & Camacho, T. C. (2015). Investigating the immigrant paradox and Latino adolescents’ academic attitudes. Journal of Latina/ o Psychology, 3(1), 56–69. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/lat0000031. Benner, A. D., & Graham, S. (2007). Navigating the transition to multi-ethnic urban high schools: Changing ethnic congruence and adolescents school-related affect. Journal of Research on Adolescence, 17(1), 207–220. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1532-7795.2007.00519.x.
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