The major goals of this project are: 1) to increase our understanding about how family and child factors are related to the academic achievement of Mexican American children, 2) to evaluate novel school-based intervention programs that include distinctiveness reduction, attribution retraining, and reading comprehension training, and 3) to determine whether an intervention which includes the family is superior to one that is focused solely on the child in school. To accomplish these goals, two studies involving primarily fifth and sixth grade Mexican American children and their families are proposed. In the first study, demographic data and descriptive information about home environments, family values, and expectation of Mexican American parents regarding their children's academic performance will be gathered. In addition, Mexican American children will be asked about their expectations for academic achievement and whether they feel distinctive or different from their non-minority peers. Feeling distinctive may be an important factor undermining Mexican American children's success in school because it reduces attention to learning tasks and encourages internal attributions for failure (such as lack of ability). The relationships between family and child variables and the relative success of two school-based intervention programs (vs. a no- instruction control condition) will then be assessed. One intervention will involve teaching reading comprehension skills; the other will include distinctiveness reduction, attributional retaining, and reading comprehension. The second study addresses the question of whether family involvement, in combination with a school-based intervention, will further enhance children's reading skills and academic achievement. Mexican American children and their families will be divided into two experimental and one no-instruction control conditions. One experimental group will receive school-based instruction in distinctiveness reduction, attributional retraining, and reading comprehension; the other will receive the same school-based training coupled with a component that involves the family (i.e., requesting parents to have their children read to them, to check on homework, etc.). Comparisons of school and school-plus-family interventions provide more stringent tests of the benefits of family involvement than are currently available in the literature and an assessment of relationships between degree of treatment effectiveness and individual differences in the child and his or her family.
