Peer Group Influence and Academic Aspirations Across Cultural/Ethnic Groups of High School Students

CREDE Integrated Summary Patricia Gándara University of California, Davis   I. Description of Project A. Central Focus This is a study of how adolescents from different ethnic groups form their expectations about schooling and their postsecondary aspirations during the four years of high school. A focus of the study is how peers shape these attitudes and aspirations. We know that many forces are at work, and if you ask students, they will tell you that their parents and families are the chief architects of their aspirations. However, adolescents easily dismiss the influence of their social context and peer norms on their beliefs and aspirations. Most have little awareness of the degree to which they shape what they think and aspire to based on what is perceived as acceptable or expected within their immediate social contexts. We also know from a considerable body of literature that family structure and norms differ substantially among cultural groups and that these norms surely mediate the effects of the social context in which adolescents live and develop. However, it is not clear from the literature in which ways these influence differ among groups. We also wondered how the formation of aspirations would be influenced by rural versus urban contexts within the same ethnic groups--a question which is not well addressed in the literature. The primary questions driving the study are: (1) Across cultural/ethnic groups, what factors influence the formation and change of peer groups (both proximal and distal)? (2) Across cultural/ethnic groups, in what ways do peers influence, support, or undermine academic goals of their friends? (3) What determines the relative influence of multiple peer groups? (4) Across cultural/ethnic groups, how do school and community context and family background mediate the influence of peers and vice versa? We are also well aware of the developmental influences that shape adolescent behavior and the enormous changes that teenagers undergo during the high school years. Therefore the study pays close attention to changes in atittudes, aspirations, and social pressures and peer group influences over time. B. Purpose of the Study Schools all over the country are diversifying at dramatic rates. In California the school age population is composed of a majority of minority students. Similar trends are occurring in Texas, New York, Illinois, Florida, and states across the Southwest. At the same time, schooling has become virtually the only avenue for social and economic mobility as entry level jobs in industry now require at least a high school education, and often much more. We do not understand well the pressures that act on low income and working class students from different ethnic/cultural groups to either continue their studies or to exit from school prematurely. It is critical that we understand this phenomenon better if we are to be successful in reforming school practices and helping families to guide these young people toward productive futures. The aim of this study is to provide critical knowledge about how ethnically diverse adolescents come to make critical decisions about their schooling and their futures, and what role families, peers, and communities have on these decisions. C. Relationship of Project Activities to Work Plan This project began in earnest a little more than a year ago. During the first year of the CREDE Project, we requested no funding and spent the year conceptualizing the study and laying some groundwork for it to begin in July of 1997. Hence, we are now at the beginning of our second year of operation. To date, we have followed the work plan faithfully after making minor modifications in design that included reducing the number of schools in the study from three to two. This was occasioned by a hard look at our budget and the realization that we could not afford the transportation costs associated with adding another school in another part of the state. Other than this, we have moved forward as planned. The first year of operation (1997-98) included establishing ourselves in the two schools that are our sites of study, making presentations to administrators and faculty and laying out a plan with the schools for the year’s study efforts. A primary task of the first semester of the first year was to engage participants. We sought 80 participants in the urban school and 40 in the rural school, balanced by gender, ethnicity (four groups: Asian, Latino, Black, and Euro-American), and high versus moderate achievers. We made a decision early on not to include very low achieving students (below 2.0 GPA) at the onset of the study in order to reduce the threat of attrition. If students fell into the below 2.0 GPA category once in the study, they would not be removed. The first task of the study was to collect survey data on all incoming 9th graders in the two study schools at the beginning of the school year. At the same time, we were seeking long-term participants for our study who would help us to sort out the meaning of the responses to the surveys and to act as guides through the lives of students from different ethnic backgrounds on these two campuses. Surveys were adminstered in all 9th grade English classes in October of 1997 and by the end of the month we had analyzed the data from these surveys and were able to meet as a team to begin to analyze what students were telling us about their aspirations, the pressures in their lives, the ethnicity of their friends, and the things that were most important to them at this stage of their lives. The surveys were extremely revealing. In line with our work plan, we were able to find the desired number of study participants and worked most of the year to get parent permission slips returned from them. We also worked hard at finding the best way to get the students to come to focus group and other meetings for data collection purposes. This was no easy challenge. High school students have busy lives and it is often difficult to get several students together at the same time in hours outside of class. For this reason, we eventually had to seek, and received, permission to pull students out of class for research purposes. We met with the participants in small focus groups that usually included only one gender and one ethnic background at least three times over the year at each school to pursue the research questions. We found that students were much more willing to talk openly when they were segregated in this fashion. Students were able to provide insights into the survey responses that were inaccessible from the survey data alone and topics were raised in the focus groups that could not be dealt with adequately through survey techniques. Transcript data were also collected for all study participants to allow us to chart their individual paths through school. We will analyze these data alongside the attitudinal and descriptive data culled from individual and focus group meetings, and survey results. The second year of our study has just begun as students returned to school, this year as sophomores. We have collected survey data on all 10th grade students in both schools during the first week of October. These data are being analyzed to chart changes in the students, and we will investigate attrition among our sample as well as attrition in the schools as a whole. Missing participants are being replaced. By the next quarterly report we will be able to describe change and continuity from freshman to sophomore years, general attitudes, and we will be focused on the second-level questions to be addressed in focus group sessions during the year. We will also be able to chart the retention and academic performance of students to date, by gender, ethnicity, and academic performance upon entry into high school. We will begin to develop a chart of friendships and peer influences for different groups of students and to better understand the social forces that influence them. We have planned to bring the participating students to the university campus at the end of October 1998, both as a reward for participating and as a way to help them to bond with us and the project as they begin to form ideas about their postsecondary plans. We also intend to hold an informational workshop at each of the schools in Spring 1999, entitled "Issues of students’ adjustment to high school in the first two years." D. Relationship of the Project to the Program Themes Program 3 has three themes: linking schools, communities and peers; engaging all families in schools and keeping the academic pipeline open. All of these themes are central to the focus of this study. Because this study is interested in learning more about the ways in which peers and communities, in conjunction with school practices, influence the development of academic aspirations among diverse youth, and how each mediates the influence of the others, these linkages are a common thread in our analyses as well as our data collection efforts. Families are engaged in the activities of this project through family interviews which will begin this year and through workshops built on the data collection. The involvement of families serves multiple purposes. Certainly one purpose is for data collection-- to understand how expectations and attitudes are transmitted and mediated by parents. But we are also interested in creating a context for this study that is ecologically sound and accounts for the importance of parents and siblings in the growth and development of adolescents. We hope to forge an awareness among parents in the schools in which we are working about their important roles in their children’s development, and the ways in which they might choose to intervene with their children, armed with information about the multiple influences in their lives. Keeping the pipeline open is in a sense the raison d’etre of this project. We are seeking ways to enhance interventions with low income and working class, ethnically diverse youth to ensure healthy high school outcomes and opportunities for postsecondary education. We are attempting to learn more about what influences students in both positive and negative directions, and understand the things that mediate these influences. With this knowledge we hope to expand the pipeline. E. Relationship of Project to CREDE themes This study is distinctively socio-cultural in its perspectives and approach as it seeks to understand students within their particular social and cultural contexts and to observe the effects of these factors on their choices about schooling and futures. We have considered not only gender, but ethnicity, and community type as well. We find remarkable differences along all of these dimensions, and interesting intersections among these factors. While our study in not focused in the classrooms of these students, rather on their broader social and cutural contexts, some of the principles of the CREDE project lack particular relevance for us. However, in spirit, the principles are indeed themes in our own research. The study has been conceived of as a joint enterprise (Principle 1: facilitate learning through joint productive activity) with the student participants in the schools, as well as with the undergraduate and graduate students who we have employed as assistant researchers. These college-age students, all from the same ethnic and income backgrounds as the students we are studying, are also being shaped by this experience and enhancing their own perspectives on their future work. At the same time, student participants in the study are gaining valuable skills of analyzing their own situations and seeking to understand the things that motivate their academic and social behavior. This study, as suggested by Principle 3 (Contextualize teaching and curriculum in the experiences and skills of home and community) is very much contextualized in the students’ homes and communities, and in fact, our aim is to better understand these influences on their academic and social/personal choices. By organizing the data collection activities around university students who share the same cultural and ethnic backgrounds of the students, and by respecting high school students’ desire for small group sessions that include only individuals from similar backgrounds and the same gender, we have endeavored to maintain the integrity of these sociocultural contexts. Consistent with Principle 4 (Challenge students toward cognitive complexity), the high school students (as well as the university undergraduates) are being challenged to think complexly and to analyze their own situations and those of their peers as we jointly try to discover the meaning of certain factors and behaviors --both pro-school and anti-school--that students report as having an effect on their schooling and future plans. Finally, Principle 5, which deals with engaging students in dialogue, especially instructional conversations, applies aptly to this project. Most of the data collection, and analysis, occurs through student dialogue. Instructional conversations occur as students and researchers engage in joint inquiry and reflection about the topics discussed. For example, one of the findings of the survey is that some groups of students have very high aspirations for postsecondary education, yet they evidence little regard for the study required to realize these aspirations. We have asked the students to suggest why this might be. Students must "unpackage" what it means to aspire to college, and what the role of things like homework are in helping to achieve those goals. Students then interpret for us how students may view both of these concepts in quite a different light than we do. A great deal of instruction --of both students and researchers--is occurring through these conversations. Each is advancing opinions, beliefs, and a new body of knowledge embedded in the context of the conversations. II. Implications A. Emergent Findings (1) Most students hang with others of the same ethnic background, but White students are more inclined to say there are no problems with race relations on campus, while students of color are quick to point out that there are. On the rural campus many students (usually White students) contend that racial background is not a factor in forming friendships, however observation on the campus shows that strict racial lines are drawn according to where kids hang out and with whom. (2) Students on the urban campus are more likely to confront racial divisions and admit to them. They are also more likely to talk openly about problems of all kinds. On the urban campus, Black students are culturally dominant even though they do not represent a larger portion of the population than other ethnic groups. On the rural campus, White and Latino students simply occupy different spheres, such that cultural dominance of the school is not so apparent. Yet, the high rate of absenteeism of Latino students reduces their visibility on the campus. Asian students in the urban school maintain their own activities and are often mutually supportive; there is a higher proportion of Asian high achievers than is found among the Black and Latino students, but there are also troublesome behavioral problems among this group. White students tend to be drawn into the higher academic tracks and the arts courses, while both Blacks and Latinos are more likely to be in the lower academic tracks. (3) Racial comfort as well as cultural opportunities on campus and academic and "school within school" tracking all work to divide students into friendship groups largely defined by ethnicity. (4) High risk behaviors differ substantially in the urban and rural environments. For example, gang activity is a major concern among Asian and Latino adolescents (and to a lesser extent among Blacks) in the urban school, but it is not a concern in the rural environment. White students report very little pressure to engage in gang activity. One of the biggest threats in the rural environment, however, may be students’ lack of focus on postsecondary options. Many Latinas, in particular, have little sense of possibility and post high school plans is not a topic of conversation for many of these young women. In the urban school, all students are much more aware of their options--whether they choose to pursue them or not. (5) Latino males in both rural and urban environments and Black males in the urban school are the most likely to say that they have very good relations with their parents, while simultaneously being at the highest risk for school failure and involvement in risky behavior. Why would the students who are doing the poorest in school have the best relations with parents?? Students suggest that in-school and in-home codes of behavior are very different for these students, and that parents do not realize the level of difficulty that their children are having in school. (6) Some groups of students are especially concerned about money and are extremely anxious to work, however this does not appear to be correlated with actual family income. In other words, it is not necessarily the poorest students who express the greatest concerns about money and a desire to work--it is the students who articulate the greatest perceived needs. Working is not always bad for students, but it introduces at least three major risks: (1) that it will rob students of time needed for homework and study; (2) that it will reorient them away from school and towards a peer group that may not even attend school; and (3) that it creates a dependency on a level of income that makes schooling less attractive in the short run since school represents time dedicated to an activity that is not immediately remunerative. Hence, a better understanding of students’ perceived need to work could be very valuable in counseling them about both its benefits and risks. (7) It must be noted that we have experienced extreme difficulty in locating high achieving (3.0+ GPA) students among some groups--particularly Black and Latino males, and especially in the urban school. The fact that it was impossible to find 5 (of about 50) Black males with such a level of academic performance in the entire freshman class at the urban high school was stunning. In other words, fewer than 10% of the Black males starting high school had at least a B average. Inasmuch as the typical trajectory is downward for low income urban students through the high school career, this bodes very poorly for the eventual high school outcomes for these adolescents. It is clear that intervention needs to occur before they reach high school, but certainly there is no time to waste once they are there. We do not see such intervention taking place. B. Conclusions It is far too early to begin to draw conclusions about our emergent findings, but they do establish a baseline for looking at change over time and they do alert us to issues of importance for adolescents as they begin their high school careers. We are forewarned that attrition in our samples may be a major problem, with so many of the students at risk from the beginning of high school. We will document this, and document what happens to students who we lose, to the extent possible. However, it also points up the urgency of understanding better the pressures that these students face to not do well in school. III. Reflection A. Project’s contribution to increased knowledge and theory A recently published study of academic aspirations of minority youth (Kao & Tienda, 1998) points out that "no study has examined aspiration formation of Asian and Hispanic youth (p. 350)." Kao and Tienda have attempted, with the NELS 88 data base to begin to look at this issue, but this is an area of investigation that is largely uncharted. This study represents the only attempt at investigating this issue prospectively over the course of the high school career and charting changes over time. We expect that our findings will add greatly to a meagre literature and that we will be in an excellent position to begin to formulate theory in this area. B. Use of effective methods By using both quantitative and qualitative methods we expect to be able to combine data in a way that will provide unique insights into the issue of formation of academic aspirations across ethnic and cultural groups. The study is especially advantaged by having a team of researchers who are of the same ethnic and income background as the students who are being studied. These research associates not only are able to relate well to the students, but they are able to provide insights to their behavior and responses that would not be possible with other researchers. We are also building a core of future researchers and educationists among the university students who are working with us on this project. I am extremely confident of our methods and think they represent a unique contribution to the strength of the study. C. Contributions to current research in the field I believe this is answered in III.A above D. Benefits of work in relation to cost I believe that this project is the lowest funded of all four or five year projects in the CREDE portfolio, yet we have found innovative ways to stretch our funding that has allowed us to accomplish an enormous amount with existing funds. We have used work study , university outreach, and other university program funds to pay salaries to undergraduates, and I have found other sources of funding to pay the requisite fees and tuition of one of my graduate students. This has made it possible for us to have a team of about 8 researchers, some of whom receive university credit, with very limited funding. Also by finding undergraduate and graduate students who come from similar backgrounds as the students we are studying, we have been able to attract researchers who feel a strong personal commitment to the project. The decision to reduce from three to two high school campuses that are located within easy commuting distance was also important in conserving resources. This has allowed us easy access to the schools which facilitates more frequent visiting, while also saving the project considerable money. Fortunately because of our geographic position, we are within close proximity to both highly urban and rural districts. We have also been able to attract campus resources to allow us to bring the high school students to the campus, providing them with an opportunity to get to know a university campus and providing us with the opportunity to work with them in a setting with unique advantages. By getting students away from their own campus, this can free them to be more open about feelings and attitudes and provides extended time in a relaxed and casual atmosphere that can more easily elicit open conversation. In sum, I think we have been extraordinarily creative in stretching our dollars and providing a very substantial product at a minimal cost to the project. E. Connections to other programs We have had extensive conversations with Azmitia and Cooper of project 3.x with regard to combining data sets and some "anchor" questions exist in both sets of data collection instruments. This will allow us to compare responses across the two data sets and to extend our anaylses both downward to the middle school and upward to the high school students. We will continue planning and collaborating during the 1998-99 study year as emergent findings are beginning to make more clear where the intersections in our work exist. We intend to produce a joint product. I have also been in regular contact with the Harvard Immigration Study investigators as we talk about our methods, instruments, and potentially mutually complementary findings. This is an ongoing discussion which already is helping to shape each of the studies, but may well result in more formal collaboration as data collection proceeds. I expect this to result at the very least in some joint analysis of our data sets. IV. Impact The potential impact of this project is far greater than I had envisioned. Certainly, we expect the study to have a substantial impact on the knowledge base in the field, given that so little is known about this topic. However, unintended impacts include the effect on the undergraduate students who are working with the project. I had not anticipated to what extent they would become interested in education and education research as a result of this program. One of our students graduated last year and wrote me a letter telling me that the experience in the project had a profound effect on her thinking about her own career plans. Other students who are still with us voice similar interest in pursuing a career in teaching or working with young people, or pursuing a research degree, as a result of their experiences with the study. As we do workshops with faculty and parents, we intend that we will have an impact on how they see the challenges that these young people face and that we will be able to help them begin the process of addressing those challenges in a more productive way. V. Dissemintion of emergent findings Our first attempt at dissemination will occur in the spring with a school workshop to include families and faculty. It would be premature for us to attempt any more extensive dissemination at this point. VI. Next Steps We intend to continue with our work plan as outlined and forge greater collaboration with the projects with whom we have been sharing ideas, thoughts, and methods.