| Brenda Arellano
University of California, Santa Barbara
The impact of parental involvement in the achievement of language minority Latino students in early elementary school
As the largest ethnic minority group, Latinos are projected to increase to 25% of the entire U.S. population by 2050 (U.S. Census Bureau 2003). Latinos nationally over the age of 25 have high school graduation rates which are significantly lower than African Americans, Asian, and White students. Even fewer Latinos pursue higher education. To complicate schooling matters further, many Latinos come from homes where English is not the dominant language.
Much of the literature that is current which relates to Latino parents' home and school involvement has been done on a qualitative level through case studies, through smaller quantitative analyses or using secondary databases such as NELS 88 which concentrate on a high school cohort. However, more research is needed at the beginning of the academic pipeline where the achievement gap emerges early in the first few years of school (Farkas, 2003). Even fewer quantitative studies at the early elementary level exist which focus specifically on language minority Latino students. This study will attempt to fill this gap using a quantitative design focused on Latino language minority students utilizing a secondary database that focuses on the elementary school period.
This study will investigate the impact of parental involvement on the early academic achievement of children from language minority Latino families. Further, this study will test if parental involvement is a multi-dimensional construct and if certain dimensions have more impact than others, and whether the impacts vary across English and Spanish households and across other racial and ethnic groups. The first part of the study will be to test if parent involvement is a multi-dimensional construct. My next step will be to test whether certain parental involvement constructs matter more on student achievement over time. The last part of my analysis will be to answer the question of whether parent involvement practices differ among English and Spanish households and also among different racial/ethnic groups. This will be accomplished using factor analysis and a structural equation model (SEM).
This study hopes to provide a framework for understanding parent involvement in its varying dimensions as it operates nationally in parents of early elementary students. This study also will try to understand which dimensions of parent involvement are most critical and if language is a barrier to involving Latino parents in their child's academic world. Lastly, this paper has a goal of testing whether parent involvement really matters in helping to improve academic outcomes.
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