Moving Lives: Educational Pathways of Immigrant Youth
Monday, February 12, 2007
Presented By
Presented by the Psychology Section
Speaker: Carola Suarez-Orozco, New York University
In this talk I will present data from the Longitudinal Immigrant Student Adaptation Study (LISA), a five-year longitudinal study, which combined interdisciplinary and comparative approaches to document patterns of adaptation of 400 recently arrived immigrant origin youth from China, Central America, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Mexico. I will examine a series of questions— Does, on average, the academic performance of new immigrant youth change over time? Does academic performance over time differ by gender and by country of origin? Using Nagin cluster analysis, I present what are the longitudinal performance pathways exhibited by new immigrant youth. Lastly, I consider what is the association between a number of predictors and two alternative measures of academic performance—grades as well as achievement scores on standardized tests. I provide various models that elucidate the contribution of these factors in predicting grades, as well as standardized achievement test scores in the last year of the study. I will end by presenting recommendations for policy and practice to better serve immigrant youth.