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Dominican, Salvadoran, and Chinese Immigrant Parents’ Reasoning About School Readiness Skills

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Abstract

Background

The importance of parental beliefs and practices related to children’s school readiness skills is widely documented, but few studies explicitly focus on immigrant families. Further, no known studies have examined immigrant parents’ beliefs about what skills children need to be successful in kindergarten.

Objectives

The overarching aim of this mixed-methods study was to investigate the school readiness beliefs of parents who are identified as immigrants in the United States. We examined the skills they prioritized as well as parents’ reasoning about their prioritization.

Methods

Sixty-three immigrant parents from three different countries of origin—China, the Dominican Republic, and El Salvador—completed a Q-sort and subsequent interview about their school readiness beliefs as well as a measure of acculturation.

Results

Results indicated two school readiness belief profiles. Parents in the first profile primarily emphasized academic skills; parents in the second profile primarily emphasized learning-related skills. Parents’ country of origin predicted their profile membership. Six themes emerged to explain parents’ school readiness beliefs. Although parents in the two profiles prioritized different skills, parents’ reasoning about the importance of select skills showed many similarities.

Conclusions

Study findings provide a nuanced view of immigrant parents’ school readiness beliefs, which is particularly useful for early childhood educators to consider as they develop culturally responsive family-school partnerships.

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Notes

  1. The version for the Dominican and Salvadoran parents stated, “I enjoy speaking Spanish,” whereas the version for the Chinese parents stated, “I enjoy speaking Mandarin” and so forth for the other questions.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the parents who participated in this project. We also thank the research assistants for their important role in this project: Amanda Ferrante, Jocelyn Godoy, Sophie Goodfellow, Raquel Jouvin, Ying Lu, Isabela Madrigal, Benjamin Quiñones Shepherd, Qinqin Yang, Bing Zhou

Funding

This work was supported by research grants provided by Lehigh University and University of Maryland-Baltimore County.

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Authors

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Correspondence to Brook E. Sawyer.

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Conflict of interest

No authors have any conflicts of interest.

Human and Animal Participants

Research involved human participants.

Informed Consent

The study was approved by the Institutional Review Boards of the authors’ universities; Informed consent was attained from all participants. Study procedures were approved by the authors’ university institutional review boards. Prior to participating in data collection, all participants provided informed consent in the language of their preference.

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Sawyer, B.E., Dever, B.V., Kong, P. et al. Dominican, Salvadoran, and Chinese Immigrant Parents’ Reasoning About School Readiness Skills. Child Youth Care Forum 51, 137–159 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10566-021-09623-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10566-021-09623-3

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