The Seattle Bilingual Orientation Center (SBOC), also known as the World School, is a place where immigrant students from all over the world, who collectively speak more than twenty languages, learn the necessary language and cultural skills to adapt to life in American society. The Adobe Foundation gave computers and video, multimedia, digital art, web, animation, and audio software to the SBOC with the purpose of providing “underserved youth around the world with the skills they need to prosper in the global 21st century economy.” This study sought to evaluate the impact, both social and academic, that this technology has on the students who use it. My research focused on answering the following two questions: do students believe they benefit from access to the technology, and do students continue to use the knowledge gained in class outside of what is required of them? Through observations and interviews with students, I gained a perspective on how students value the opportunity to work with such software and how they feel about their time spent working with technology as opposed to doing something immediately applicable to their daily lives, such as learning English. If the outcomes at the SBOC reflect the intention of the Adobe Foundation, meaning that students retain and reuse the information learned for their own benefit, then programs like this could be implemented in schools all over the nation to continue helping immigrant students as well as the rest of the student population to better understand the culture in which they live through the use of multimedia.

Previous research shows that on a number of different dimensions, minority students are treated differently in schools (i.e., they receive less attention from teachers, and that attention is less positive). The research suggests that differential treatment may contribute to minority students’ lack of success in school. Our project aims to test this prior research by understanding if teachers ask their minority students different types of questions than the other students in the class, which would be a form of differential treatment. Drawing on video data from a larger project on teacher quality, I will observe three 5th grade science teachers using the same FOSS inquiry-based, science curriculum. I will compare and analyze what types of the questions they ask, to whom they ask those questions, student responses, and the quality of discussion that follows via “on the fly” coding techniques. The goal of this analysis is to distinguish whether or not there is a pattern of questions asked to the students and examine how this influences student achievement in these science classes. The results of this project will allow teachers to better understand why the questions they ask are important to student-teacher relationships and how they can best alter their teaching strategies in order to have better overall student achievement in their classrooms.

The purpose of this research project is to bring awareness to the low high school completion rates and the even lower college completion rates of foster children across the state. In the state of Washington only 59% of youth in foster care enrolled in 11th grade completed high school by the end of 12th grade. Many of the students that do not graduate on time drop out of school permanently. Only 3% of foster children complete a bachelor’s degree. On any given day 1% of youth are in some form of foster care across the United States. Although foster children represent a very small segment of the population, their education should still be invested in. In the state of Washington there is a program, implemented by Treehouse 4 Kids a Seattle based organization that provides educational advocacy for foster children. This program “works statewide to protect students’ educational rights and remove barriers to school success." Unfortunately the educational advocacy program is in jeopardy of being eliminated. I will compare the outcomes of children in foster care in the state of Washington who participate in the advocacy program and those who do not. I hypothesize that the educational advocacy program increases the education outcomes of foster children by providing a buffer effect. If my hypothesis is supported, I will submit my finding to Governor Gregoire in an attempt to advocate for continued funding to the Educational Advocacy Program.

 About 65,000 undocumented students graduate from high school every year in the United States. These undocumented students face tremendous challenges to obtain a high school diploma and some of them will continue struggling as they move on to the realm of higher education. These students blend in with their peers in classrooms, lecture halls, sport teams, and student groups; however, their needs, in respect to what they require to move on in their educational career, are very different to those of any other students. Some of their needs include access to non-government sources of financial aid, advice on the college application process, information on in-state tuition qualification requirements, counseling on after-graduation opportunities, and information about their rights. Many school districts, community colleges, and universities encounter these questions and needs on a daily basis, but few of them have developed policy or an infrastructure to respond to these needs. This research study, Supporting Undocumented Students: Policy, Resources & Social Networks, explores the education system in relation to the experiences of undocumented students and proposes a framework to support this group of students through policy, resources, and social networks. In addition, this study analyses some of the best practices to support undocumented students and the possibilities of incorporating similar approaches within the Washington State’s K-12 and higher education system.

The purpose of this study is to understand why there is a crisis in Latino education and to propose what can be done about it. Research indicates that Latino college students for the past ten years have consistently graduated at the lowest rates and dropped out of college at the highest rate compared to other minority groups. Most of the research that has attempted to explain why Latino college students tend to graduate less and drop out more, focus on student-centered explanations: they are not ready for college, they cannot afford to go to school or they need to work long hours while in school, they are lonely and feel alienated, and they are the first in the family to go to college. This research, instead, will focus on other factors that explain Latino college student attrition that are not necessarily based on students’ characteristics. These factors include: lack of school resources, lack of dropout prevention programs, lack of culturally competent faculty, counselors and staff, lack of meaningful curricula, and the lack of community support systems. This study will review the literature on college attrition with respect to Latinos in relationship to other dominant and minority groups. In addition, five Latino students who have dropped out of the University of Washington campus will be interviewed anonymously. This study will attempt to add to the literature on minority college student attrition that emphasizes the need to look at both student and school-centered explanations for college student attrition. Hopefully, this study will provide a better set of strategies for both school administrators and students to help prevent dropping out of and encouraging graduation from college. Eventually, these strategies will help reduce the crisis of Latino graduation rates.

In recent years, a movement to protect a special, highly vulnerable category of unauthorized immigrants called unaccompanied minors began. Unaccompanied minors are children younger than eighteen years, present in the United States without documentation, parents, or other legal guardians. Prior to 2003, these minors were held in jails and denied many rights. Due to the work of human rights organizations, the government began to place these minors in residential shelters, where their lives change substantially. They are exposed to many different perspectives, cultures, opportunities and changes while living at these shelters, including following a structured schedule, attending school and going on outings. An important question is: How are these youth adapting to these new living arrangements? Much literature has focused on undocumented adults and youth with families, but there has been a dearth of research on undocumented minors who migrate by themselves. This research focuses on a residential shelter and the interactions of unaccompanied minors who reside there. Through interviews and participant observation, I examined the shelter’s role in the lives of these youth to determine whether the interactions they had with residential staff, the environment of the shelter, and other youth induced any behavioral changes during their stay. My findings suggest that the longer the youth stayed at the shelter, the more their future aspirations, perspectives and behavior changed. Some became more social, confident, comfortable, mischievous, angry, depressed or curious. Factors that contributed to behavioral change included the age of the individual, how he was treated and viewed within the group, how he viewed the shelter, events that affected his family, whether he was going to be deported, and his desire to continue living in the U.S. Research of this nature is important for understanding how these institutions are altering the lives of unaccompanied minors.