Acculturation and school adjustment of minority students: school and family-related factors

Abstract

The process that ethnic minority youth undergoes while adjusting to mainstream culture is known as acculturation. Acculturation refers to changes in behaviour and attitudes through contact between individuals from different cultural backgrounds (e.g. Berry 2006). Acculturation is a multifaceted construct that distinguishes between acculturation orientations, acculturation outcomes, and conditions of acculturation (Arends-Tóth and Van De Vijver 2006). The ecological approach to acculturation research suggests that the relationship between acculturation and adjustment is shaped by the surrounding context (Castro and Murray 2010; Salo and Birman 2015). For ethnic minority children and youth, family and school are the two main contexts where acculturation unfolds. Thus, characteristics of the school and family context influence the process of acculturation and its outcomes (e.g. Makarova and Birman 2016; Suárez-Orozco et al. 2018). In the school context, acculturation outcomes can be measured in terms of students’ academic performance as well as their psychological and behavioural adjustment (Makarova and Birman 2015). Therefore, the school adjustment of ethnic minority students is a highly important outcome of the acculturation process (Berry et al. 2011). This special issue discusses the trajectories of minority students’ acculturation in terms of schooland family-related characteristics that are influential for youths’ school adjustment. It provides multifaceted insights into challenges that minority students, their parents and their teachers encounter during the acculturation process and illustrates the interplay between schooland familyrelated factors of minority youths’ school adjustment. With articles contributed by researchers from Germany, Hungary, Israel, the Netherlands, Russia, Switzerland and the USA, findings from empirical studies on the acculturation and school adjustment of minority students in a range of different countries are reported. Elena Makarova, Judith ‘t Gilde and Dina Birman examine teachers’ attitudes, behaviours, and expectations as well as their teaching practices as risk and resource factors in minority students’ school adjustment. This study provides