CAREER: African American Mothers' School Involvement at the Kindergarten Transition

University Of North Carolina At Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill NC

Investigators

Abstract

Award Abstract PI: Rowley CAREER: African American Mothers' School Involvement at the Kindergarten Transition As the number of people from ethnic minority backgrounds in the United States is rapidly increasing, it is important that researchers improve the research methods used to address development in minority children. Much of the current research on ethnic minority children is fraught with theoretical, methodological, and conceptual problems. Some issues that are prevalent in current studies are the equation of race and social class, the overuse of designs that compare people of color with Whites, and the negative focus on social class as an explanation for school failure. This project will address these issues through a research project, the teaching of a graduate course on research methods with minorities, and the training and mentoring of African-American undergraduate students with minimal access to research opportunities. For the research project, one hundred African-American children and their mothers will be followed from just before kindergarten begins through the end of their second grade year. The study will employ a multi-method, longitudinal strategy to examine the way that African-American mothers' memories of school experiences, current beliefs about school, sense of parenting efficacy, racial identity, perceptions of discrimination, and interactions with their children influence that child's social and academic adjustment to kindergarten and beyond by way of mothers' involvement in the child's schooling. It is assumed that mothers' memories of their experiences in school will frame the way they socialize their children for school, the activities they engage in, the discussions they share, and their modeling of school-related behaviors and attitudes. There will be considerable emphasis placed on the mothers' experiences as African Americans, including their perceptions of discrimination occurring currently and when they were in school. The study is aimed at further examining the strong relationship between social class and children's school adjustment and at further explicating the complex beginnings of home-school interactions. The teaching aspect of the project will be fully integrated with the research program and entails a mentoring component and a curriculum development component. For the mentoring component, six undergraduate students, two from the host institution and four from North Carolina Central University, a local Historically Black University (HBU), will be involved in each stage of the research process, much like graduate students. For the curriculum development component, the principal investigator will design and teach a graduate level course on research methods with populations of color.