Navigating and Negotiating Home, School, and Peer Linkages in Adolescence

Final Report Executive Summary Principal Investigators: Margarita Azmitia – University of California, Santa Cruz Catherine R. Cooper– University of California, Santa Cruz Executive Summary As students move from elementary to middle school, teachers and parents expect them to manage schoolwork and chores, consider their future school and career goals, and reflect on their moral values, all while juggling active social lives with peers. Many students also participate in activities offered by community organizations. Surprising little is known about how students coordinate these family, peer, school, and community worlds, how others help or impede this coordination, and the impact of such coordination on school achievement. This project investigated how students, family members, teachers, peers, and program-based organizations coordinate students' experiences across these worlds in the transition from elementary to middle school and childhood to adolescence, a time of academic risk for low-income Latino and European American students. We carried out two longitudinal studies. The first study (school-based sample) followed 68 (36 girls and 36 boys) Latino and 100 (54 girls and 46 boys) European American sixth graders through the transition to middle school (7th grade). The students were recruited from the elementary schools that served the highest percentage of Latino and low-income students in a public school district in a small coastal city in central California. Sixty-six percent of the Latino students and 19% of the European American students were low-income, as defined by eligibility for free or reduced price lunches. Most of the parents and 53% of the Latino students were immigrants, typically from Mexico. The Latino parents had limited proficiency in English, but most of the students had achieved proficiency in English by the end of seventh grade. The second study (program-based sample) followed Latino students enrolled in an academic outreach program though middle school and high school. The demographic characteristics of the Latino students who participated were similar to those of Study 1. Students were selected into this academic outreach program on the basis of essays and teacher recommendations. Because this small program only selected a few students from each school in the county, few of the participants in Study 1 were involved in this program. Our research drew on two theoretical models that have played a key role in research on at-risk students in particular and ethnic minority populations in general. From Ecocultural Theory (e.g., Harkness, Super, & Keever,1992; Rogoff, 1990; Tharp & Gallimore, 1988, Weisner, 1986; Whiting, 1980), we adopted the assumptions that communities develop goals, values, and skills that allow them to adapt to their environments and establish meaningful lives, and that people acquire these cultural tools by participating in routine everyday activities, such as classroom lessons, homework, and housework. Our work primarily addressed the third CREDE principle, "to contextualize teaching and curriculum within the experiences and skills of students homes" (Tharp, 1997). We extended this principle to include the peer and community worlds. The Bridging Multiple Worlds Model (Phelan et al. 1991, Cooper, 1998) builds on Ecocultural theory and incorporates the concept of world, contexts in people’s lives (e.g., family, peer, school, community organization) that organize activities as well as require coordination. Cooper’s adaptation of Phelan et al.’s Bridging Multiple Worlds model also highlights developmental aspects of these contexts, such as noting how these contexts change from childhood to adolescence to adulthood and how youth learn to navigate and negotiate across worlds. The difficulties of contextualizing at-risk students’ navigation and negotiation between worlds, and specifying the linkages and non-linkages between worlds, have been highlighted in Ogbu’s (1991) model and more broadly, the cultural discontinuities framework (Cazden, 1988; Heath, 1989; Tharp & Yamauchi, 1994), which shows how differences in the activities, interaction scripts, values, and goals of students’ worlds can impact academic performance and future ideation negatively. While our work sought to contribute to this research by identifying discontinuities between students’ worlds in adolescence (to date, most work has focused on early childhood), we also aimed to contribute by identifying continuities and linkages between worlds. Our two longitudinal studies addressed five research questions: (1) What continuities, discontinuities, and linkages occur across students' family, peer, school, and community worlds as they move from elementary to junior high school? Continuities, discontinuities, and linkages can occur at the level of activities, relationships, interaction scripts and discourse, and goals and values and can be orchestrated by students, parents, siblings, teachers, and peers as well as school and community program personnel. (2) What resources and difficulties do students and parents encounter in navigating and negotiating these four worlds? (3) How are students' experiences linking their worlds reflected in their school achievement and future school, work, and moral goals? (4) How can students develop relationships across ethnic and income groups that help them coordinate worlds in ways that benefit their academic performance and further their academic, work, and moral goals? (5) How do peers and siblings in program-based activities become resources in students' schoolwork and goals? Research Design School-based study: The students and families who participated in this two-year longitudinal study were recruited during the fall of sixth grade and followed through the spring of seventh grade. Students were observed in the classroom during math and English lessons during the spring of sixth grade. Their teachers ranked the students in their classrooms on their math and English performance and provided ratings of their behavior and their parents’ involvement in school. Parents and students were interviewed at home about the home, school, and peer activities, family, teacher, and peer guidance, and academic, career, and moral goals and pathways. Students also completed a more in-depth interview about friends at their school during the spring of each year of the study. At the end of each school year, we gathered students’ grades and achievement test performance. Program-based study: Students who participated in this ongoing research partnership entered the program at 6th grade through their schools, who were working with the community college outreach program. Data were gathered beginning with the cohort entering the program in 1996. Our data base now includes 500 youth. Conclusions and Implications We found significant overlap in the activities, values, and goals in students’ family, school, peer, and community program worlds. In both studies families played a key role in supporting students’ present and future academic, career, and moral pathways. Importantly, Latino parents’ aspirations for their children did not dim over the transition to middle school, a time that poses many challenges for at-risk students and their families. We found several continuities between the family and school worlds, most notably that parents, teachers, and students held college-based aspirations and parents, siblings, and teachers provided assistance with homework and other school-related activities. However, Latino parents lacked information about U.S. schools and how to guide their children towards college. An implication of these findings is that intervention programs for Latino and other immigrant families should provide information about U.S. schools and college pathways so that they can help their children attain their high aspirations. We also found discontinuities between home and school. For example, parents in both ethnic groups defined being on "the good path of life" as primarily being a good person with good moral values and behavior, with academic success playing only a minor role; in schools, being on the good path is primarily defined in terms of academic performance and goals. Older siblings played both positive and negative roles in students’ lives. In both studies, siblings provided guidance with homework, the future, and personal problems and worries. Sibling assistance with homework was correlated with students’ grades in Study 1 and older siblings played a key role in recruiting students into the community-based program in Study 2. However, parents reported that older siblings, and especially boys, who were disengaged from school and on the "bad path of life" modeled negative behaviors for the students and put them in contact with a peer group their parents and teachers did not approve of. For the most part, students’ reported that their peer world encouraged academics, a continuity with home and school worlds. Parents also perceived their children’s friends as supporting academics, although like teachers, they viewed the larger peer world as providing pressure against school success, particularly for Latino boys. The longitudinal component of Study 2, which followed the program "regulars" from middle school into high school, showed that over time, peers increased as resources for homework, particularly for students who had exceeded their families’ educational level (but parents, and especially mothers, still were the primary resource for future orientation). However, peers, and particularly those who did not attend the outreach program, also increasingly became challenges in students’ academic pathways. An important goal of our study was to identify linkages between students’ worlds and their academic performance and goals. We found that family talk about the future and problems/worries, family and teacher assistance with homework, and peer encouragement of school were positively correlated with students’ math and English grades. Participants in the school-based sample indicated that they seldom discussed their academic and career goals with their teachers, although most believed that their teachers wanted them to succeed. In the program-based sample, teachers became increasingly engaged in helping students plan their futures as they developed a partnership with the outreach program. For example, the application essay became a standard homework assignment and teachers participated in the selection of students for the program. Taken together, our findings paint a more positive picture of the school world of at-risk students than has been presented in the past. Yet, we did find that teachers underestimated Latino families’ involvement in school and that some Latino families, and especially those in which the target student was a boy, reported high levels of discrimination from teachers and other school personnel. In Study 1 most parents reported that their children were on the good path of life, although many, and especially Latino students, were already experiencing academic difficulties in sixth grade. No Latino students were enrolled in pre-algebra (advanced math) in seventh grade. Study 2 showed that in the context of a community-based outreach program, students can get back on a college-preparatory math track. This study, which followed students into high school, revealed that by ninth grade, more than half the students had taken and passed Algebra, a key step to eligibility for four-year colleges and universities. Of the remaining students, each was eligible for community college, where Algebra 1 is the only math required for an Associate Arts degree. Students’ math pathways diverged early: students who passed Algebra 1 at ninth grade had made higher grades in sixth grade than students who failed Algebra or took remedial classes (that is, they were on the consistently high pathway), while others declined. But some students moved back on track after challenging personal events and others increased from remedial math to Algebra, sometimes retaking Algebra before more advanced classes. Others persisted with low grades or remedial work, and sometimes took Algebra 1 in community college. These findings go beyond group differences in school achievement towards understanding variation and change within groups as well as similarities across them. Tracing more than one pathway to more than one kind of college helps build inclusive opportunities for college and college-based careers. An important implication of these findings is that academic outreach or enrichment programs need to begin in the late elementary school years, when students’ academic pathways begin to diverge. In the future, we will continue to assess the school, family, peer, and community worlds of students who are on positive and negative pathways to college and life. In addition to highlighting the positive role of European American and Latino students’ families in their schooling and future pathways, our research emphasizes the need for students’ families, schools, and community-based programs to orchestrate students’ negotiation and navigation of these worlds and establish linkages across worlds in ways that promote academic and moral development.