Mexican Immigrant Children’s Math Achievement: The Role of Neighborhood Institutional Resources and Family Context

• In Event: Heterogeneity in Neighborhood Effects on Child Development: An International Perspective

Abstract

Children from Mexican immigrant families are a large segment of the U.S. student population; however, they are underrepresented at most stages of the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) pipeline (Crisp & Nora, 2012; Lopez et al., 2018). Math learning in elementary school lays the foundation for STEM education, and the math gap between Mexican immigrant children and their peers starts at kindergarten (Crosnoe et al., 2004; Xie et al., 2015). One potential channel to improve Mexican immigrant children’s math achievement is to leverage out-of-school institutional resources within their neighborhoods (Suárez-Orozco et al., 2010). Some promising evidence demonstrates the educational benefits of connecting immigrant children with neighborhood-based resources (Dearing et al., 2016; Small, 2006; Yasuike, 2019). However, less is known about the relation between the availability of these resources and children’s educational performance, especially math achievement. Moreover, families play a critical role in how Mexican immigrant children access resources such that the link between neighborhood resources and these children’s achievement might depend on their family context (Shuey & Leventhal, 2019).

Accordingly, the current study examines whether the availability of neighborhood institutional resources (i.e., educational, STEM youth-serving, general youth-serving, racial-ethnic minorities & immigrant-serving NPOs, museums and libraries) is associated with Mexican immigrant children’s math achievement in elementary school, and if the associations are moderated by strength-based indicators of their family context (i.e., parents’ expectations, parental home- and school-based involvement). We anticipate the greater availability of neighborhood resources will be linked with Mexican immigrant children’s superior fifth-grade math achievement; this positive association is expected to be pronounced among children whose parents have higher expectations and are more involved in children’s learning.

Given the substantial demographic changes in Mexican immigrant families’ residential patterns over the last two decades (Turner et al. 2016), and research highlighting the importance of replication studies in developmental science (Duncan et al., 2012), we used data on two cohorts of Mexican immigrant families from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten 1998 and 2010 (N ~ 880 and 1460), and linked them with administrative data on neighborhood resources.

Multilevel models were the primary estimation approach to account for children nested within neighborhoods and examined the association between neighborhood resources and children’s fifth-grade math achievement. Kindergarten math scores and a rich set of individual, family, school and neighborhood covariates were included to mitigate bias of selection into neighborhoods. Interaction terms between resources and the family context variables were added separately to examine their moderating roles.

Results revealed consistent associations between educational NPOs and Mexican immigrant children’s fifth-grade math achievement across cohorts. In addition, evident only for the 1998 cohort, general youth-serving NPOs compensated for lower parental expectations, home-based involvement strengthened the benefits of STEM youth-serving NPOs, whereas lower parental expectations hindered the role of racial-ethnic minorities & immigrant-serving NPOs. The mixed results of neighborhood institutions and how they intersect with Mexican immigrant family context highlight the need for future research on resource access, usage, and quality and how to build effective family-neighborhood partnerships that bolster the benefits of these resources.

Authors

• Fei Tan, Tufts University
  Presenting Author

• Tama Leventhal, Tufts University