Supportive Relationships

This research, supported by the William T. Grant Foundation, focuses on understanding classroom-level social settings in which English language learners, along with their English-only and bilingual peers, learn alongside each other in middle school classrooms.

This mixed-methods study seeks to understand the development, characteristics, and influence of non-parental youth-adult relationships (YARs) across contexts over key transition points during adolescence.

This project examined the processes that make up mentoring interactions to understand the “how” of mentoring from both the adult mentor and youth mentee perspective.

Through the Young Women’s Leadership Program (YWLP), we are studying how mentor engagement facilitates social development of college student mentees as well as those from low socioeconomic backgrounds. 

Middle school is a time when peer influence becomes most salient. Most of the focus has been on this as a risk promoting process. This study focuses on how student peer social and academic networks promote learning and inclusion and may reduce ethnic group inequalities in achievement. 

This study will examine whether participation in an inter-group dialogue program during the school year enhances strengths conceptualized in the “positive youth development” paradigm and diversity-related values, and promotes ethnic identity exploration among high school students.