Collaborative Research: Weaving Together Supports for the Academic Success and Racial Identity Development of Low Income and First Generation AA&NHPI Students

Low-income first-generation Asian American and Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander (AA&NHPI) college students are concentrated in the nation’s Asian American and Native American Pacific Islander-Serving Institutions (AANAPISI), but there is little research examining how these institutions design and implement services and supports to “serve” their students. This project is a research-practice partnership (RPP) composed of higher education practitioners, faculty, and academic researchers in the fields of higher education and learning sciences designed to generate knowledge about how AANAPISIs enact “servingness.” The three lines of inquiry include 1) investigating how practitioners define and enact supports for students (i.e., servingness); 2) understanding how students experience servingness and how this relates to their academic and psychosocial outcomes, including racial identity development; and 3) an analysis of the impact of a tutoring program on multilingual college students’ outcomes. Through a multiple methods design, our RPP works collaboratively to design, implement, measure, and assess the efficacy of AANAPISI program’s educational interventions on academic outcomes and racial identity development among students. The project also examines how the development of the AANAPISI program and its stakeholders’ sociocultural cognition supports AA&NHPI students’ academic and racial identity development. While servingness has been conceptualized as institutional structures and processes that comprehensively attend to both students’ academic success and positive racial identity development, there are few studies that have taken developmental perspectives to examine how institutions learn to design and implement practices that respond to these goals. By viewing cognition and learning at the institutional-programmatic level, and facilitating such learning through a RPP, this study examines how institutions learn to become AANAPISIs and serve their students. Furthermore, the study is one of few that connects locally designed, culturally-relevant educational practices to measurable academic and positive racial identity outcomes. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.