Mexican Immigrant Students Research Articles

The Development and Description of an Inventory to Measure the Reading Preferences of Mexican Immigrant Students

This article details the development of an inventory that identifies and measures reading preferences of sixth- through ninth-grade Mexican immigrant students. The inventory of reading preferences employs a unique methodology which utilizes open-ended, rating type questionnaires and annotated titles for 22 reading preference categories in combination with two statistical techniques (Q- quotient and reading preference factor) all developed by the researcher to accurately measure reading preferences. Reliability coefficients ranged from .90 to .96, far exceeding the typical range of .60 to .80 for similar inventories. Three panels of experts, one including children in validating the inventory, identified 36 annotated titles representing the dominant culture (Section A), and 37 annotated titles representing one of four predominant cultures in the Southwest: Mexican, African American, Native American, and Anglo American (Section B) from a pool of 120 annotated titles. This inventory was used to investigate seven primary and four secondary research questions. Summary results are provided. Other uses of the inventory are suggested.

The Significance of the TAAS Test for Mexican Immigrant and Mexican American Adolescents: A Case Study

This article draws primarily from a 3-year qualitative case study to offer evidence that high-stakes testing is one among a number of alienating features of schooling. The focus is on low-achieving Mexican-origin students attending a segregated, urban high school located in Houston, Texas. The data show that the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills test often discourages regulartrack, Mexican American and Mexican immigrant students from completing high school or considering a college education. The required, English-only nature of the exit test is also highlighted as a key reason why limited-English-proficient, primarily Mexican immigrant, students fail to meet the passing requirement at high rates. High-stakes testing is characterized herein as embedded within a larger logic that systematically negates Mexican youths’ culture and language.

The hidden persistence of immigrant “dropouts”: Distortions, blank spots and blind spots in research on schooling careers

High dropout rates of Hispanic students have been documented repeatedly in recent decades. Nationwide, the percentage of 16- to 24-year old Hispanics who are reported as dropouts is almost four times that of nonHispanic Whites, and over twice that of African Americans. The analysis of first- and second-generation Mexican immigrant students presented in the first section of this chapter suggests that these estimates may be inflated and in other ways distorted. The persistence of a number of youths in the face of discouragements is hidden by methods of documentation that generate distorted estimates of dropout rates. In the second section of this chapter, we suggest that it is also hidden by a tendency, common in both documentation and substantive studies, to employ broad classifications that are insensitive to fundamental differences in ethnicity, to the character and conditions of immigration and emigration, and to family and community relationships. In the third section of this chapter, we suggest that the ways we conceptualize schooling careers help blind us to schooling persistence, as we tend to see failure in causal terms (“because of” statements) and success in terms of individual agency (“in order to” statements). In a final section, we consider the rather staggering demands that we face if we hope to reduce our ignorance of immigrant schooling in the many blank and blind spots represented by our few examples.

Mexican Immigration and the Port-of-Entry School

The results of an immigrant student census in a port-of-entry school district are used to describe the educational backgrounds of Mexican immigrant students and to distinguish types of Mexican immigrant students by school entry patterns. Interviews with recently arrived Mexican immigrant parents reveal the educational and occupational expectations they hold for their children in the U.S. The study findings are used as a basis for raising policy questions and generating research issues.

Sociocultural Adjustment to School and Academic Achievement

This study describes the sociocultural, personal and interactional context in which a young Mexican male adolescent participates. The interrelations between these factors reveal the difficulties which some Mexican immigrant students confront in their acculturation process and the affects of those influences on their academic achievement. The acculturation process referred to here assumes that an immigrant student can acquire a new language and culture while maintaining his own culture. This paper postulates that a student's academic failure and success depends upon a complex set of interrelated factors which must be understood in order to design effective educational intervention programs. The intervention approach presented here attempts to build upon the knowledge of the student's experience and to provide a resocializing model for high-risk students.