Stephanie J. Rowley - US grants

The transition to middle school is a time of great change for most youth. Although many of these changes are positive, the middle school transition is also associated with declines in motivation, self-concept, and achievement for many young adolescents. Little research on this critical transition has focused on African American students, who face additional challenges associated with their growing awareness of racial differences and racial discrimination. The goal of this project is to identify factors that lead to success across the transition to middle school for Black youth, and to investigate how the process differs for students transitioning into a racially consonant middle school environment versus those moving into a racially dissonant context. A primary focus of the study is the role of parents' attitudes and beliefs about achievement and their race socialization strategies on the achievement striving of African American adolescents. At Time 1, 300 African American fifth graders in predominantly Black elementary schools (i.e., at least 75% African American students) will complete measures of parent race socialization, race centrality, attributional beliefs, educational utility, perceived competence, and classroom engagement. Their parents will complete measures of race socialization, race centrality, attributional beliefs, educational utility, and perceptions of the child's competence. Teachers will rate students' abilities and classroom engagement. Two years later, when these youth are in middle schools that vary in racial composition, the adolescents, parents, and teachers will again complete the study measures. Achievement data will be collected from schools for both assessment points. Analyses will distinguish among the experiences of Black youth in predominantly Black versus racially integrated schools and will elucidate parental socialization that leads to successful academic achievement for African American youth.

This research will inform both general developmental theory and research specific to African American families and children. In terms of general development, it will further explicate the critical role that parenting plays during the transition to middle school. The study will also address how the development of race-specific attitudes (racial identity and race-related achievement attributions) affect the educational experiences of Black youth. Finally, the study will be a timely assessment of the role of school racial composition during this age of rapid resegregation of America's schools. Thus, these results will inform post-desegregation educational policy, policies aimed at eliminating the Black-White test score gap, and policies directed toward school reform at the middle school level more broadly.

This collaborative project aims to study the effects of personal and group identity variables on STEM educational outcomes. Longitudinal data will be collected and analyzed on a number of self and other motivational variables to understand how these personal and social factors are likely to determine the educational trajectories and decisions of African-American youth. Little research, though, has addressed developmental changes in stereotype awareness and endorsement, or ramifications of stereotypes and discrimination for identity development and achievement striving in Black adolescents. The proposed study will model the relationship of two salient group memberships, race and gender, with achievement outcomes for Black youth. Prior research has underscored the need to attend to race and gender simultaneously, as well as the importance of evaluating motivational and achievement outcomes within
academic domains (e.g., English and science).
The proposed study is an extension and expansion of a previous NSF-funded
longitudinal study of African American youth. The goal of this follow-up study is to concentrate more explicitly on the simultaneous effects of race-related and gender-related experiences and beliefs and on investigating how these experiences play out across different course content domains (e.g., English, science, and mathematics). Using survey and qualitative methods, the study will describe normative development in self-concept, stereotypes, motivation, and parenting from fifth through twelfth grade. Another important goal of the project is to determine whether the advantages gained by girls in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics(STEM) areas are maintained as they prepare to move through more advanced coursework and college applications, and what personal, family, and school context factors predict STEM interest and success for both genders. The proposed outcomes will aid in the understanding of how self-concept and other self variables impacts motivation as a predictor for success in STEM disciplines which may in turn broaden participation of under represented groups.

The Center for the Study of Black Youth in Context (CSBYC) will focus on research and action on social, psychological, and educational development among African American children and youth. The CSBYC has four major objectives: (1) to develop an infrastructure for a series of coordinated research investigations of the ecological, cultural, racial, and familial contexts that influence the development of African American children; (2) to provide training for early scholars, graduate students, and undergraduate students around skills necessary to do research and practice with diverse populations of ethnic minority children in diverse community and school settings; (3) to cultivate collaborative relationships and partnerships between the University of Michigan and local communities to inform current and prospective practice and intervention approaches for improving youth social and educational outcomes; (4) to serve as a resource and clearinghouse for scholarship, training, and practice approaches that can be utilized by scholarly and community stakeholders in the state more broadly, as well as among institutional and community settings nationally. To meet these goals, CSBYC investigators will conduct an initial research study of middle school aged children in four diverse community settings. The goals of the research project are to study ways parents and family caregivers socialize their children around race and to examine the influence of various types of parenting on child academic and social outcomes. Using multiple methods (surveys, family diary studies, qualitative interviews, and observations), the research will show how parents choose parenting strategies based on characteristics of their communities (e.g., racial and economic diversity) along with their appraisals of the racial, cultural, and class dynamics of their communities.

The CSBYC research will contribute to understanding of normative development of African American children within their varying family, neighborhood, and school contexts, which has received relatively little systematic attention. The study of Black youth from different social class backgrounds is important for a number of reasons. First, despite the growing Black middle class in America, a disproportionate number of studies have focused only on low-income Black children in urban settings and/or on high-risk youth populations. Consequently, race and social class often are confounded in research and in its application to practices/interventions to enhance youth development. There is less knowledge of family, educational, and social development processes of African American children across different social class groups and the implications of community social class and demographic diversity, such as Black families' movement to, and increasing representation in, middle class or suburban settings. For instance, studies show that parental education is one of the biggest predictors of school achievement among African American youth, yet even middle class African American students trail their European American counterparts in academic achievement. Such patterns suggest that parents of different social class backgrounds differentially negotiate the schooling process for their children. It also suggests there still is much to be learned about variation in family processes within lower and higher socioeconomic levels. By examining Black families from diverse community contexts, the CSBYC investigators will address important questions about the nature of development among Black youth in ways that can support the efforts of researchers, communities, schools, and families to encourage successful development among children and adolescents.

This collaborative proposal focuses on African American parents' racial beliefs and experiences as mechanisms shaping their parenting relevant to youths' science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) success. The purpose of the longitudinal study is to investigate the relationship of parents' race related beliefs to their socialization (particularly their fostering of science and math skills) of their early adolescent children. The project links race as a social identity with parenting and young adolescents' performance in science and mathematics. The investigators will obtain survey data in Grades 6, 7, and 8 from 380 African American students, one of their parents, and their teachers. Hypotheses regarding the relationships between parents' race-related experiences and beliefs (i.e., racial discrimination, knowledge of inequalities, racial identity, and endorsement of race stereotypes) and the academic socialization of their children will be tested. Differences in these processes by child gender and ability will be examined.

The project's intellectual merit is its potential to advance understanding about STEM success for underrepresented youth. The focus will yield new insights in an area where African American youth are likely to face negative stereotypes and discriminatory treatment, and where most prior research has focused on classroom processes rather than parenting. Broader impacts of the work are in the realms of education and training; inclusion of under-represented groups; and dissemination to teachers, families, the public, and to the scientific community.

The goal of this postdoctoral fellowship award is to facilitate the professional development of a young scientist. In this project, the PI seeks to understand the nature of African American parents' beliefs about race and discrimination and how those beliefs impact their emotion- and race-related socialization and their adolescent's socioemotional functioning. This research highlights the importance of utilizing a mixed methods approach to understand how parenting patterns relate to the meaning-making around race in the socialization agenda of African American parents. The research audience gains a better understanding of how certain parenting patterns contribute to a variety of adolescent socioemotional skills, particularly in racially integrated academic settings. The research also examines a diverse sample of African American parents, allowing for the identification of pattern similarities in parenting experiences, despite socioeconomic background. Findings are disseminated among the scientific community, scholars, and community stakeholders and will advance the current literature on the importance of both general and race-specific parenting processing in African American families. In addition, this research broadens the participation of underrepresented groups in social science research by involving minority undergraduate and graduate students as research assistants. Through data collection and management, undergraduate and graduate students gain skills in conducting survey research, interviewing, and they also receive the opportunity to present the findings from this research at national conferences. These opportunities help prepare minority students for later success in the pursuit of graduate degrees and academic careers.

Several models of parental socialization suggest that parents' beliefs are important for both parenting behaviors and also for children's outcomes. Currently, there is little empirical work examining the role of parental beliefs associated with race and discrimination in guiding general and race-specific socialization and subsequent relations with adolescent competence in African American families. This line of inquiry is particularly relevant given the history of African Americans being targets of racial discrimination and parents being faced with the challenge of raising their children to be successful in a society in which their racial group is often devalued and made victims of individual/institutional racism and race-related violence. Further, although there is growing scholarship on examining racial socialization among African American families, there is little consideration of the role of emotion-related processes surrounding the experience of and preparation for race-related experiences (e.g., racial discrimination). We know racial socialization contributes to adolescents' overall well-being and ability to cope with discrimination, yet it is still unclear how race-related socialization processes work independently of and/or jointly with other general socialization processes (e.g., emotion socialization) that are known to have great impact on children's socioemotional competence. The current study builds on the principal investigator's previous work by using a mixed-methods approach with both interview and questionnaire data to examine the content of parents' beliefs about race and discrimination, the contribution of these beliefs to their emotion and racial socialization practices, and the existence of parent profiles by their beliefs and socialization behaviors. Finally, parents' profiles are examined as predictors of their adolescents' socioemotional functioning. The participants are 300 African American parents, their 6th grade children, and the adolescents' teachers. Families are followed for three years. In year 1, parents participate in semi-structured interviews and students and teachers will complete surveys. In subsequent years, parents, students, and teachers complete online surveys. The sample is drawn from three racially and economically diverse schools in Southeastern Michigan. The current study contributes to theory and research seeking to understand how parents' beliefs about race and discrimination play a role in their parenting strategies and in their children's development. The framework being developed in this research will inform future research and interventions aimed at understanding and fostering parental strategies that contribute to the positive development of African American youth.

Racial disparities in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) have persisted for decades. This project assesses African American students' awareness of racial inequities and how such awareness is related to students' STEM motivation through three broad aims: (1) to investigate changes in students' science and math motivation as they transition to high school; (2) to measure changes in youth's knowledge of racial inequities across the high school transition and whether such knowledge is related to changes in STEM course-taking; and (3) to examine the influences of African American parents' race-related experiences and beliefs on their socialization of their children and on their children's STEM motivation. In addition to contributing to scientific theory regarding racial inequalities, motivation, and achievement outcomes, the study has the potential to inform intervention efforts that would target adolescents' and parents' knowledge of racial inequities and ways that families might foster youth's success in STEM domains. Immediate impacts include training of undergraduate and graduate students from underrepresented backgrounds and creation of an intergroup dialogue program for students and parents aimed at increasing their race-related academic consciousness.

Participants are 380 African American youth and their parents and teachers who have already participated annually in this STEM-focused research project during the youth's middle school years. In this new stage of the project, students, parents, and teachers will complete surveys when youth are in Grades 9 and 10. Key hypotheses to be evaluated are (1) science and math motivation will be strongest among youth who already in middle school held an awareness of inequities, and whose motivational beliefs emphasize agency and efficacy; (2) students' awareness of racial achievement gaps will increase over time, and system-blame attributions (e.g., attributing achievement gaps to teacher bias) will lead to greater STEM persistence and success; (3) parents' knowledge of racial inequality will be positively associated with racial pride socialization and preparation of their children for discrimination; and (4) parents' racial socialization, homework monitoring, school involvement, and encouragement of youth's extracurricular STEM activities will be positively associated with youth's STEM success. We will test these hypotheses using latent growth curve modeling, assessing change over time and ways in which earlier measures (e.g., students' and parents' awareness of achievement gaps when youth were in middle school) predict change in parents' socializing behaviors and students' STEM motivation and success. These results will inform our intergroup dialogue program, which will be designed with the collaboration of consultants at the University of Michigan and California State University.