The erasure of Latino/a adolescents' multiliteracies in school settings affects both their views of education and their entry into the community outside of school. Framed by literacy-as-social-practices perspectives and communities of practice theory, this case study explored what happened when a group of 13 Latino/a adolescents and their Latina teacher engaged in a six-week play production in an after-school program and performed the play for parents. It examined the relationship between the participants' discourse practices and their performance, and determined how they validated their performances. Data collected included observations, interviews, students' written reflective responses, a fieldwork journal, and a DVD of the performance. Data were analyzed using Discourse Analysis (Gee, 2005), three characteristics of multimodal literacy adapted from three features Cowan (2003) used to analyze Latino visual discourse, and Grounded Theory (Glaser & Strauss, 1967; Strauss & Corbin, 1990). The findings revealed a complex performance community mediated by a set of discourse practices and tools, including a script and a video. The video's history, traced to a former 7th grade after-school group, and the participants' social practices framed their interactions. The findings revealed the discourse practice of playing around was constructed in relationship with the teacher's expectations and became an intractable binary. After one actor assessed the situation as hopeless because of the teacher's involvement in the construction of the discourses, she "left" the play and constructed herself through a new critical discourse, and imagined an easier and more equitable discourse. Another discourse juxtaposed Discourses of immigration, recognizing them as speaking to one another across history. Although the methodology was adequate for answering the research questions, it was inadequate for reaching findings on how the performances created effects for both the actors and audience. Both pedagogical and methodological errors were the result of how the visual world of print shaped our thought, extending the visual into the social world, separating it from the other senses. The actors drew from elements of the six modes of meaning to create a system of multimodal design in their performance text, and although they validated their final performance in reflective responses, they invalidated their rehearsal performances. Elements of their Discourse model serve as a blueprint for a Design for Performance Learning. The Design proposes that Latino/a adolescents take responsibility for their learning by producing sharable digital artifacts in after-school performance communities, which might prove to be contexts in which Latino/a adolescents' multiliteracies are validated rather than erased.

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is the 6th leading cause of death in older Americans. Currently there is no cure for AD, and even though the specific cause is unknown, diabetes mellitus type 2 (DM2) is regarded as a risk factor. Hispanics have a higher incidence of DM2 and possibly AD. I chose a life course theoretical model for this quantitative cross-sectional study to illuminate the variables most pertinent to a pathway from good health to poor health. The variables chosen were hypertension (HTN), obesity, smoking, stroke, dyslipidemia, and lower educational attainment. The research questions were used to examine biologic, metabolic, sociologic, and genetic risk factors in the development of DM2 and subsequently, AD. Using data from the National Alzheimer Coordinating Center, the association between DM2 and AD in Hispanics over 65 years of age was examined using Ï?2 and logistic regression to determine whether DM2 in this population contributes to AD development. No association was found between DM2 and AD (OR .791, 95% CI = .441-1.509, p = .476). Risk factors independently associated with AD were HTN, a history of stroke, and lower education in Hispanics. Obesity measured by BMI, dyslipidemia, smoking, and the APOE gene was not significant in their association to AD. This study offers information that medical providers can use to help determine which risk factors affect this population and may thereby alter the course of AD in their patients. Medical providers can make a significant impact on an individual's life by diagnosing dementia early. Early diagnosis could prevent or delay cognitive dysfunction and improve quality of life by using culturally and linguistically appropriate tools.

Minority women groups in the United States have the highest incidence and mortality rates of cervical cancer. Hispanic women have the highest incidence rate and the second highest mortality rate of the disease. Researchers have examined the lower rates of cervical cancer screening among Hispanic women, as compared to other groups of U.S. women, but researchers have not examined the extent to which socioeconomic status, acculturation, and sexual activity impact Hispanic women's compliance with screening. The purpose of this study was to examine the association between compliance with cervical cancer screening and acculturation, socioeconomic status, and sexual activity among U.S. Hispanic women. The framework for investigating the extent of association between these identified barriers and willingness to comply with screening was the behavioral model for vulnerable populations. Chi-square tests and logistic regression were used to analyze data from the National Health Interview Survey for 2011, 2012, and 2013, focusing on U.S. Hispanic women ages 21 - 65 (N = 739). The findings from this study revealed that educational level was significantly associated with U.S. Hispanic women's cervical cancer screening; however, no statistically significant associations were found for socioeconomic status, acculturation, and sexual activity and screening rates for this group. Findings from this study can better inform researchers and others of the lower rate of screening for cervical cancer among U.S. Hispanic women. The findings will also promote positive social change by targeting U.S. Hispanic women and other minority women groups for programs that promote cervical cancer screening.

Biculturalism in the Latino population in U.S. has been found to relate to positive outcomes in the literature. However, little is known about the development of bicultural adaptation. The constituent parts of biculturalism, acculturation, and enculturation were measured over several years as part of an existing longitudinal study along with several variables that held promise as predictors of acculturation and enculturation change. An additional data point for acculturation and enculturation was gathered along with other important demographic information. Change in both acculturation and enculturation was modeled revealing that acculturation and enculturation increase and decrease linearly. The trajectory for acculturation is much steeper than the trajectory of enculturation, providing support for orthogonal measurement and indicating real possibilities for interventions to increase bicultural adaptation. The best-fit model for acculturation included years in the U.S., preference for speaking English, and receptive English vocabulary. The best-fit model for enculturation included years in the U.S., preference for speaking English, and receptive English vocabulary.

This work explored the academic success of 10 Latino/a students in Southern View School District, a school district in the state of Utah. The students and their parents, when available, were interviewed and the students' academic records were reviewed. The students were asked to identify a school person, teacher, administrator, or staff person, who could help explain their success. The school person was then interviewed. The data were collated and analyzed using resilience theory and the critical race-based constructs of resistance and resilience resistance. The construct of colorblindness was also used to discuss the participants' attitudes towards less successful Latino/a students and their families. The work revealed that the successful Latino/a students accessed the protective factors of personal strengths and environmental resources to remain resilient and achieve in school. It was also discovered that the students' success was also a form of resistance that was explained using the constructs of conformist resistance and resilient resistance. The student success was revealed as a way to resist oppression and remain in the educational pipeline. It was also discovered that student, parent, and school participants had adopted a colorblind ideology that assumed equal opportunity was available to all without regard to race. These observations led to the conclusion that the school system and the students of color it served would benefit from direct discussion of White privilege and what it means to be of a non-White racial group. The recommendation was that the school should adopt a systematic model of social justice education that could help more student access protective factors and facilitate critical conversations about race

Academic achievement disparities exist across race and ethnic groups. Parents may be a good resource to their children for their educational success. Parental academic involvement is associated with student academic achievement across race and ethnicity. This study explored the relationship between race and ethnicity and parent time-use on children's education. In addition to studying parental academic involvement across race and ethnic groups, the Latino American ethnic group was examined. Heterogeneity exists within race and ethnic groups. Understanding differences in parental academic involvement within the Latino American ethnic group is a step toward addressing education disparities across race and ethnic groups. The last aim of the study was to see if structural differences within families were associated with group differences. The sample was obtained from the 2010 American Time Use Survey and included parents with household children younger than 18 years. Logistic regression results indicated that race and ethnicity was associated with time spent on children's education. However, when the structural variables were accounted for, the race and ethnic differences became statistically nonsignificant. Many of the structural variables were associated with parent time spent on children's education. Parent demographics and other structural variables may make it more or less likely that parents spend time on their children's education. Study findings also showed that for the Latino American subgroup, one group, Central/South Americans, look more likely to spend time on children's education. Puerto Rican parents were statistically significantly more likely to spend time on their children's education for one model tested, but not the other. Controlling for structural variables did not remove the association in the Central/South American group. The results for the Latino American ethnic group analyses differed slightly from the race and ethnic group analyses. The results suggest that there are differences across groups regardless of parent demographics and family structure. The findings also suggest that teachers and school administrators may improve parental academic involvement by targeting programs to fathers and full-time employed Latino American families.

With the growing percentage of immigrant families in the USA, language transition is a common immigrant experience and can occur rapidly from generation to generation within a family. Child language brokering appears to occur within minority language families as one way of negotiating language and cultural differences; however, the phenomenon of children translating or mediating language interactions for parents has previously been hypothesized to contribute to negative outcomes for children, such as role-reversals and parentification, emotional distancing and lack of communication, increased parent-child conflict, and increased internalizing/externalizing disorders. The current study used direct observations of 60 Spanish-speaking parent-child dyads (30 mother-child and 30 father-child) as they worked on a joint academic task in English to explore: (1) child language brokering patterns, (2) parent-child interactions, and (3) the quality of the parent-child relationship. Children included in the study were between the ages of 4 and 10 years. Instruments used included demographic questionnaires, the ARSMA-II, and coding of videotaped interactions for language brokering patterns (frequency and prevalence of both child translations and parental prompts), parent-child relationship quality, parental engagement strategies, and the situational power dynamic between parent and child. Observations, descriptive statistics, correlations, and a hierarchical regression were used to analyze data. Results demonstrated that language brokering occurred at a higher prevalence among the youngest age group than prior studies have suggested, parents actively contribute to child brokering behaviors through parental prompts, and mothers and fathers use different engagement strategies. Findings also demonstrated that child language brokering significantly contributed to the prediction of parent-child relationship quality, with more frequent brokering associated with more positive parent-child relationships. There was no significant correlation with child language brokering frequency and the parent-child power dynamic. Results may have limited generalizability due to the exploratory nature of statistics used, the emotional safety of the observed parent-child joint task situation, and the small sample size and specificity of the sample (primarily rural Mexican two-parent immigrant families with children born in the USA). Implications for practice include: normalization of language brokering as a part of bicultural development, facilitation of insight into changing family roles and maintenance of adaptive power dynamics within a context of change, and the enhancement of parent and child communication strategies.

This study investigated the validity of measures that were hypothesized to account for significant variance in English reading ability. During kindergarten, 63 bilingual Hispanic children completed letter identification, English and Spanish phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming, and sentence repetition static assessment tasks. They also completed a dynamic assessment nonsense-word decoding task that yielded pretest to posttest gain score, response to decoding strategy, and temporally related working memory information. One week prior to kindergarten, information was gathered regarding socioeconomic status, preschool attendance, English and Spanish language dominance, and language ability. At the end of first grade, the same children completed word identification, decoding, and reading fluency tasks designed to represent the narrow view of reading. Reliability, content relevancy, construct validity, and predictive evidence of validity were examined. The letter identification task, the English-only and Spanish-only tasks, and a composite of the participants' best English and Spanish scores accounted for significant variance in first-grade word-level reading. However, the Spanish and BLS static measures did not account for significant, unique variance over and above English-only static measures, and the English-only static measures did not account for significant, unique variance over and above the letter identification static measure. The dynamic assessment measure pertaining to the response to reading strategy instruction accounted for equivalent variance in first-grade word-level reading when compared to a combination of letter identification and BLS static measures. The dynamic assessment measure yielded the highest classification accuracy, with sensitivity and specificity at or above 80% for all three formative criterion reading measures, including 100% sensitivity for two out of the three first-grade measures. The dynamic assessment of reading strategy surfaced as a parsimonious, valid means of predicting first-grade word-level reading ability for Hispanic, bilingual children. When compared to multiple English, Spanish, and BLS static measures, the dynamic measure accounted for equivalent variance in the majority of first-grade reading measures and had superior classification accuracy.

The number of Latino families in the United States is increasing dramatically. For some of the children in these families, the acquisition of reading skills is hampered by inadequate early language development. Early language development is a key predictor of reading success. Identifying ways in which parents in these families can help children acquire early language skills will better prepare them for acquiring reading skills. This study used a new parenting measure, PICCOLO, to identify parenting behaviors that are related to children's language development. The primary focus of this project was on Spanish-speaking Latino families, but a group of English-speaking European-American families was used as a contrast group. Parenting behaviors, parenting differences between cultures, and relations between PICCOLO data and children's language outcomes were explored. Results indicated that there were fewer correlations between parenting behaviors of Latino parents and children's language than there were between European American parents and children's behavior. Behaviors that were related to children's language for Latino families were combined into a factor that significantly predicted children's language. The behaviors that made up this factor seemed to be from an aspect of parenting that could be described as "hands-off responsiveness."

The purpose of this study was to investigate the funds of knowledge of Latino and Latina high school adolescents, and how they used their funds of knowledge to solve engineering design problems in their communities. This study was based on the assumption that creating a bridge between different formal resources (e.g., engineering design processes) and informal resources (e.g., funds of knowledge) is an important step toward encouraging Latino and Latina high school adolescents to enter and remain in the field of engineering. The intent of this study was to generate a framework of funds of knowledge that teachers can draw from in order to create culturally responsive high school engineering instruction that connects adolescents’ out-of-school practices to the formal practices of engineering. An ethnographic approach was used to investigate the funds of knowledge of fourteen Latino and Latina high school adolescents. The participants were selected from a rural community located in the Western United States. They were divided into four different groups and each group selected a problem in their community that was of interest to them. Each group met twice per month and every student was interviewed every month individually. For this study, data sources included participant responses to individual interviews, observations of group discussions, retrospective and concurrent protocols, and participant-generated products. A constant comparative analysis showed that the participants possessed an understanding of societal, environmental, technical, and other engineering-related practices, dispositions, and habits of mind, which helped them to engage in engineering design in a holistic way. The study suggested that Latino and Latina adolescents, although profoundly underrepresented in engineering, bring a wealth of knowledge and experiences that are relevant to engineering design thinking and practice.