Diane L. Hughes - US grants

Abstract

New York University: Center for Research on Culture, Development and Education

Joshua Aronson, Diane Hughes, Catherine Tamis-LeMonda, Niobe Way &
Hiro Yoshikawa

Despite thousands of research studies, hundreds of remedial programs, and decades of being considered a crisis for American society, the chronic academic underachievement of numerous ethnic minority groups continues to perplex educators, social scientists, and policy makers. Three trends add weight to the crisis. First, within the next 50 years, people identified currently as "minority" will comprise half of the U.S. population. Second, particularly in large urban centers like New York, new waves of immigrants are arriving, ensuring fundamental, but unknown changes to the structure and dynamics of schools and other contexts. Third, the U.S. continues to evolve into a "knowledge-driven" economy, making a solid education vital for an increasingly large sector of the workforce. More than ever, a sizable proportion of our nation's children are at risk of academic failure and economic hardship.
Faculty from multiple scientific disciplines at New York University will use NSF funding to support planning activities over a 6- to 9-month period pertaining to research that will be pursued under the proposed Center for Research on Culture, Development and Education. The central aim of the Center will be to examine how homes, schools, peers, work, and the media jointly contribute to the engagement, learning, and school performance of children from diverse cultures.
Three steps are needed to accomplish this mission. First, we propose to describe the experiences of minority children within each of the educationally relevant contexts. Many social scientists focus on determining the predictors of children's academic outcomes without a deep understanding of children's everyday experiences. Such descriptive work is notably absent in research focused on ethnic minorities. We need systematic knowledge regarding how contexts such as home, peers, school, parents' work, and the media differ or are experienced differently by children from different cultures, ethnicities or social classes. Second, we seek to understand how these experiences shape children's engagement, learning and performance in school, and whether and how such connections may vary by culture, ethnicity, and social class. Third, our ultimate goal is to advance an understanding of how home, peer, school, work, and the media work together in explaining children's academic achievement.
The second mission of the Center is educational: to transmit its research findings, through training and dissemination, to three communities: (1) a new generation of scholars of diverse backgrounds who are engaged in research on culture and its role in child learning, engagement, and performance; (2) the broader research community; and (3) policy makers and practitioners in education. This will occur through an intensive and rigorous training program and a variety of dissemination strategies of both research findings and lessons for policy and educational practice.
The proposed Center is situated within a School of Education, in the vibrant, incomparably diverse context of New York City, making it an unparalleled locale for studying culture and schools, and an ideal place to establish a think tank capable of attracting additional scholars and students of the highest quality. Through the work of the Center, we aim to bring about a deeper understanding of the interplay of culture, development and education, and thereby enhance the nation's response to the academic underachievement of ethnic minority children.

The academic underachievement of certain ethnic minority groups in America continues to perplex educators, scientists, and policy makers, despite thousands of studies, hundreds of remedial programs, and decades of being considered a crisis. Several recent trends add weight to the crisis. First, within the next 50 years, people identified as ethnic "minority" will comprise half the U.S. population. Second, new waves of immigrants continue to arrive, ensuring fundamental but unknown changes in the intercultural dynamics of schools and other contexts. Third, the United States has evolved into a "knowledge-driven" economy, making a solid education, particularly in math and science, vital for an increasingly large sector of the workforce. Finally, recent federal legislation calls for annual standardized assessments of school children, a prospect that may disadvantage certain minorities who typically underperform on these tests. More than ever, a sizable proportion of our nation's children are at risk of academic failure, posing a serious threat to the current Administration's goal of "leaving no child behind." In line with this national goal, the Center for Research on Culture, Development and Education (CRCDE), housed at New York University (NYU) will conduct research designed to identify pathways to academic success for all children. Prior research has focused narrowly on a single context (e.g., the family, peer relationships, school quality, etc.) in predicting academic outcomes, or has investigated the roles of ethnicity, race, immigrant status, gender, or socioeconomic status separately. Neither approach, however, has adequately addressed the ways in which multiple contexts contribute to educational success and/or disparities, nor how pathways vary by developmental period and culture. Furthermore, an over-emphasis on group differences has resulted in the neglect of patterns of academic outcomes within ethnic, socioeconomic, or cultural groups. Finally, studies across all of these areas have tended to utilize single methodologies, rarely integrating survey, ethnographic, experimental, and observational methods. To address these gaps, the CRCDE will gather and disseminate data about the pathways that lead to successful academic engagement and performance among culturally diverse children and adolescents. The scientific mission of the CRCDE is to use an integrative conceptual framework, cross-disciplinary collaboration, and multiple methods to (1) identify the nature of relationships that link children's experiences in five educationally relevant contexts, home, school, peers, caregivers' work, and media, to their academic engagement and performance; (2) examine whether and how these processes vary within and across cultural groups and across developmental periods; and (3) advance an understanding of how home, peers, school, caregivers' work, and media affect one another and jointly influence children's and adolescents' academic engagement and performance. The educational mission of the CRCDE is to (1) train a new generation of scholars, especially those from underrepresented minority groups, to engage in research that advances the scientific mission; (2) produce instruments and methods that will strengthen the scientific capacity of the research community to conduct culturally sensitive research on academic engagement and performance; and (3) transmit findings to policy makers, practitioners in education, and researchers, through dissemination of findings and lessons for educational policy and practice. The Center's location in the diverse context of New York City (NYC) is ideal for a center devoted to research at the confluence of culture, development, and education.

By 2040, people identified as ?ethnic minority? will comprise half the U.S. population. In urban cities, the vast majority of children entering preschool/elementary school and high school are Latino, Asian or African American, and how well these children and their families adjust to these high-stake school transitions will have long term implications for children's developmental outcomes as well as the future of the U.S. In the context of growing diversity among the nation's children, systematic inquiry into the experiences and developmental pathways of children from different cultural communities during periods of major transitions is urgently needed.

In response, the NYU IRADS builds on 5 years of research under NYU's Center for Research on Culture, Development and Education (CRCDE), and seeks to advance scientific theory and knowledge on children's social, emotional and cognitive development in ethnically diverse populations. Plans are to follow a group of 900 urban, predominantly low-income and working class families of Mexican, Dominican, Chinese, European and African American decent with young children (4-7 years) and adolescents (13-17 years) as children enter preschool/elementary school and high school. The majority of these families have participated in the research of the CRCDE over the past several years, and have already provided rich information on the background experiences of these children and families beginning at children's birth (in the early childhood group) and entry into middle school (in the adolescent group). The five ethnic groups were selected for study, as they comprise the majority of children in New York City. In addition, they enable contrasts among groups with different immigration statuses, histories of discrimination related to race and skin color, citizenship status, and language and cultural backgrounds.

The planned activities involve continued gathering of original data on aspects of children's cognitive, social, and emotional development and experiences in home and school settings that would be most sensitive to children's experiences across critical transitions. Within the area of social development, focus will be on social competence and social identity. For cognitive development, focus will be on language/literacy, math concepts and performance, classification skills, attention abilities, and academic performance and engagement. For emotional development, focus will be on children's emotion regulation. Together, these skills form the building blocks for healthy developmental outcomes. In home and school settings, focus will be on the beliefs and practices of parents, teachers and children; the quality of relationships (e.g., parent-child, teacher child); and financial resources.

The Intellectual Merit of this research includes the generation of new, culturally grounded theory and knowledge on the development and experiences of children from diverse ethnic backgrounds across multiple developmental areas, social settings, and significant developmental transitions. The Broader Impacts are framed by a set of integrated plans to advance research and education on ethnically diverse populations through the: (1) training of a new generation of scholars (especially underrepresented minorities) to engage in research that advances the scientific mission; (2) sharing of instruments, methods, and findings so as to strengthen the scientific capacity of researchers to engage in culturally sensitive studies of children's development; (3) dissemination of findings to researchers, educators and policy makers through publications, trainings, briefings and community outreach; and (4) strengthening of local, national, and international partnerships.

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Ethnic-racial disparities in achievement and mental health during adolescence, in which ethnic minority youth from African American, Hispanic, American Indian, and Asian backgrounds are at elevated risk for poor academic and mental health outcomes relative to their European American counterparts are well documented. Such disparities suggest that it is crucial to understand the potential ethnic-racial variations in the components of parenting that most effectively protect youth from maladaptive outcomes versus those that place them at risk. However, there is little consensus among researchers regarding whether varied aspects of parenting operate similarly or differently across sub-cultural groups within the United States, most commonly delimited in terms of racial-ethnic group membership. Comparative studies do not consistently disentangle differences due to race/ethnicity from potentially confounding differences due to socioeconomic, family, or neighborhood factors. And studies rarely include measures of cultural processes that permit a test of a-priori hypotheses regarding cultural factors (beliefs, goals, or value orientations) that may underlie ethnic group differences in parental influences. Thus, the central aim of this study is address previous research limitations by aggregating data from multiple datasets into a single data set that is comprised of ethnically diverse families, extensive measures of parenting, and youths'behavioral, academic outcomes, and self-perceptions alongside demographic, family, and neighborhood controls. This pooled data analytic strategy simultaneously includes and enables the testing of (a) multiple ethnic groups, (b) comparable measures of parenting and of developmental outcomes, (c) comparable controls for family, socioeconomic, and neighborhood factors that may confound empirical relationships and, most importantly, (d) methods for assessing cultural based values, beliefs, or social cognitions that may underlie ethnic-racial differences in parenting consequences, when found. Through the collaborative work of the 10 members and 4 affiliates of the Study Group on Culture, Race, and Ethnicity (SGRCE) , the central aims of the study are: (1): To aggregate data from 11 datasets (9 belonging to study group members;2 public use datasets) into a single dataset that contains large samples of participants from five ethnic groups (European American, African American, Chinese-origin, Mexican American, and American Indian), extensive measures of parenting, and youths'behavioral and academic outcomes, and also their self- perceptions (self-esteem and ethnic identity) along with demographic, family, and neighborhood variables that will be used as controls (2) To evaluate a conceptual model that specifies inter- relationships between core parenting constructs (warmth, behavioral control, psychological control, cultural socialization) and youths'adjustment (internalizing, externalizing, academic achievement) , including self-esteem and ethnic identity as important mediators, (3) To examine whether models that allow inter-relationships among core parenting variables and between parenting and youths'self perceptions and adjustment to vary across ethnic groups fit the data better than ones in which inter-relationships are constrained to be equal and (4) To utilize findings from the pooled-data analysis regarding relationships between parenting and adolescent outcomes to generate hypotheses regarding cultural processes underlying differences that emerge. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: The well-documented ethnic-racial disparities in achievement and mental health during adolescence argue for the need to understand the potential ethnic-racial variations in the components of parenting that most effectively protect youth from maladaptive outcomes versus those that place them at risk. This project examines the inter-relationships among parenting and youths'behavioral, academic outcomes, and self-perceptions alongside demographic, family, and neighborhood controls through the use of a pooled-meta pooled data analytic strategy. In light of the focus of intervention/prevention programs on parent training, this research will inform scholars and practitioners in regards to increased understanding of potential ethnic-racial variations in the components of parenting that most effectively protect youth from maladaptive outcomes versus those that place them at risk.