Exploring Resilience and Academic Achievement: A Comparison Between Mexican American Students and Mexican Students

Abstract

The demography of the United States is changing rapidly creating challenges in the classrooms and ultimately changing the educational system in the United States due to this increase in diversity. With this change there is a need for educators and educational researchers to know more about the most rapidly growing ethnic group: Latinos. The purpose of the present study was to investigate why some Latino students struggle to achieve in school while other Latino students excel in their educational pursuit. This study differs from other studies since it compares academic performance differences between Mexican (n=56) and Mexican American students (n=30) in a small suburban school district in an agricultural area in the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States. The present study investigated barriers to academic achievement such as discrimination, acculturation, language acquisition and socioeconomic status, and looked at variables related to academic success. The study focused on two psychological constructs as possible predictors of academic achievement for this group of students: resilience and acculturation. In addition, a variety of variables were used in the study as demographic predictor variables. These included: birthplace (whether the student was born in the United States or Mexico), the student's level of acculturation, the length of time in the United States, the student's level of family socio-economic status, the student's level of resilience, gender, home language, and educational placements (ESL, Special Education, technical education enrollment). The outcome variables included a variety of measures of academic achievement including grade point average and SAT scores. All of the predictor variables were analyzed against all of the outcome variables using Pearson correlations and multiple regression. The findings of this study have addressed multiple issues surrounding resilience, acculturation and academic achievement within the new demography of the United States. While there were statistically significant findings, they are not necessarily meaningful due to the small effect size. Nonetheless, it is imperative that researchers continue to explore what factors may contribute to the success of some Latinos while others do not succeed. For example, one somewhat unexpected finding was the strength of the relationship between acculturation and academic achievement, since a student's cultural competence was a strong predictor of academic success. In addition to these findings and a subsequent discussion, this study highlights the need for more culturally sensitive resilience measures or acculturation measures and ways to support Latino students in order to bridge the academic achievement gap that exists. This study did bring attention to what may be societal struggles that impede the success of Latinos in the United States education system.