Answer coming soon.

The grant supports a quasi-experimental research project that has as its goal the determination if key family member involvement with a Latino student in a college-level course will improve student success, persistence, and retention in college.  

Scholary literature has clearly identified barriers that many Latino students face that keep them from entering and succeeding in college.  Some of these barriers involve the family.  While various programs in public higher education seek to respond to these barriers, there is a need within the literature to address the positive role key family member involvement may play in supporting the success, persistence, and retention of Latino students.  This is one of the first studies of its kind nationally to determine if there are measurable outcomes from student/family member involvement in colleg-level courses.

For this porject, "family" means any person identified by a student as a family member.  A "family member" is a person who is significant in the student's life and who the student chooses to involve in his/her academic course.  Students access their family members(s) in many ways and this is reflected in FIM courses.  Interaction between the student and their family member(s) can take a variety of forms: letters, telephone conversations, email, "chat", "texting" or other methods of communication.  In a class using the FIM, the instructor may determine what types of communication might be appropriate to an assignment and would be accessible to the student and their family member(s).  FIM activities, like other course learning work, begin with the assumption of student integrity.

FIPSE is the granting agency through which the "Family Involvement for Latino Success in College" project has been funded.  The latter is the course model that includes one or more components of student/family member involvement.

No.  A student/family member component can be included in any existing course or courses under development.  As can be observed in the Family Involvement Model Chart, a number of instructors have adapted student/family member involvement, in a wide variety of formats, to existing courses.  Project faculty and others involved in the FIM project have designed and created new sections of courses that have built in student/family member involvement as a major component in the learning work.

Yes! Several instructors have introduced family member involvement into online and other non-traditional courses as well.

Not necessarily.  In fact, depending on the design of the activity, involving family members in learning work can enhance the academic value of a learning activity for a student in any course.

Preliminary project data indicates that personalizing a learning activity, by its very nature, positively affects the level of learning and the learning outcomes of a course.  Project data, generated by students in a broad specturm of academic courses employing the FIM, indicate that students enrolled in high content-oriented classes have been more successful than students in the general college population.  It would seem that the FIM would be equally as successful in orientation and human development courses.

In the community college we don't differentiate between students that we serve.  All students are invited and encouraged to take courses that include the FIM. In fact, the project collects data about all students who enroll in courses that offer family member involvement without regard to any other demographic or social factors.  However, for purposes of this grant as identified in the executive summary, the project is tracking data generated by Latino students.

Not necessarily.  It may be a matter of only modifying or redirecting an already existing activity.