Research indicates that students benefit from working with faculty with whom they can identify. Do Hispanic students find Hispanic faculty with whom to work at Hispanic Serving Institutions? To answer that question, this study builds on a 13-year line of research that has focused on engaged, public, metropolitan research universities. From a…

State policymakers in the United States have in recent years experimented with new initiatives to change the procedures used by public institutions to assess and assign academically underprepared students to non-credit developmental education (or remedial) courses. This study explores whether the most recent developmental education reform in…

This article compares Spanish proficiency assessments across three states (Texas, Arizona, and California) in relation to four overarching themes: (a) verification methods of proficiency; (b) test-task authenticity; (c) impact of pedagogical content knowledge in test performance; and (d) conceptions of language 'correctness' on the scoring…

Background/Context: There were over 500,000 open computing jobs across the country in 2018, but only 35% of U.S. high schools offer computer science classes, and only 8-10% of STEM graduates study computer science (Code.org, 2018). In 2021, only 5.1% of all Bachelor's degrees conferred were in Computer and Information Sciences (IPEDS, 2018). STEM…

The purpose of this study is to compare students' mathematics achievement growth rate in Texas science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (T-STEM) academies to students' mathematics achievement growth rate in traditional public high schools. Forty-six schools, 23 of which were T-STEM academies and 23 of which were matched non-STEM schools,…

Purpose: The purpose of this journal-ready dissertation was to determine the degree to which differences were present in mathematics achievement between Grade 4 students enrolled in charter elementary schools and Grade 4 students enrolled in traditional elementary schools. In the first article, the extent to which differences existed in…

Purpose: The purpose of this journal-ready dissertation was to determine the degree to which ethnicity/race and economic status of Texas Grade 3 students is related to their mathematics achievement. In the first study, the degree to which ethnic/racial (i.e., Asian, White, Hispanic, Black) differences might be present in the mathematics…

The purpose of this study was to compare reading scores of students and school systems using the Trilingual process (public charter district) to students and school systems using the Dual Language, Bilingual, and ESL process (public school district). Participants were low socioeconomic status Grade 3 Hispanic/Latinx students. Focused in this…

Our nation is characterized by diversity in languages, ethnicities, nationalities, and cultures with projected increases in English learners attending U.S. schools. Consequently, it is imperative that we recognize how to maximize the academic and linguistic assets of our English learner student population. This study compared the performance on…

Student enrollment at community colleges within the U.S. has remained flat or decreased for over a decade (AACC, 2019). Before COVID-19, community colleges had been experiencing a steady decline in enrollment for approximately ten years (Irwin et al., 2021). The purpose was to determine whether demographic, environmental, and academic variables…

Bolstering transfer pathways to a 4-year degree can help fill the country's increasing need for innovative, diverse, skilled workers within engineering. Drawing on survey data from a sample comprised of a disproportionately large percentage of Hispanic/Latino students, this study focuses on understanding engineering transfer students' reasons for…

This paper will include details on knowledge and ambition levels found between Latino-ethnic K-5 students located in a Southern Region of Texas from a college going culture presentation. The purpose is to understand how ambition and knowledge about higher education was influenced among Latino-ethnic K-5 students in impoverished areas. A low-income…

Latinos have become the largest minority group in American postsecondary education, a majority of whom attend two- or four-year Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs). However, little is known about labor market outcomes as result of attending these institutions. Using a unique student-level administrative database in Texas, and accounting for…

The goal of this study is to analyze the ideological positions of Hispanic college students in the U.S. Rio Grande Valley (RGV). Building on Feldman and Johnston's work, where they argue that a unidimensional model of political ideology provides an incomplete basis for study, we employ two dimensions to account for domestic policy preference. The…

In Fall 2019 I taught the course "Race and Gender: The Politics of Intersection" and spent the semester to discussing how intersectionality functioned within the Asian Pacific American (APA) communities in the United States and in the larger global context. In the course, we discussed various aspects of intersectionality including how…