ABSTRACT—
The National Task Force on Early Childhood Education for Hispanics was established in 2004 with the mission of developing recommendations for expanding and improving early childhood education for Hispanic children in ways that would enhance their school readiness and raise their academic achievement in the early years of school. On the basis of an extensive review of the evidence, the Task Force made recommendations that fell into 3 major categories: (a) increasing Hispanic children’s access to high–quality early childhood programs, (b) increasing the number of early childhood teachers who speak Spanish and English and the number of second language acquisition specialists, and (c) increasing efforts to design, test, and evaluate language and literacy development strategies across the early childhood years.
Student-oriented institutional research capacities of colleges and universities provide the means to gather, combine, and analyze a great deal of information about students'academic preparation for undergraduate and for graduate education, their academic and other experiences while pursuing their degrees, and their academic progress and development. Thus, these capacities represent an extremely valuable resource for leaders of colleges and universities as they seek to develop more effective policies, programs, and practices for improving academic outcomes for Latinos in higher education. This article offers a number of recommendations for using institutional research capacities for this purpose.
Keywords: institutional research for academic achievement; institutional research for Latino academic achievementIt is widely recognized that expanding the number of Latinos who successfully pursue associate, bachelor's, graduate, and professional degrees is one of the most important and complex challenges for American colleges and universities. It is a particularly pressing priority for institutions of higher education in the Southwest, because a high percentage of the nation's large, rapidly growing Latino population lives in that part of the country. We believe that one promising way for the leaders of colleges and universities to develop more effective policies, programs, and practices for meeting this challenge at their institutions is to make much greater use of their student-oriented institutional research capacities-and where necessary, to expand those capacities. Via the combination of large, computerized databases and the Internet, it is now possible for colleges and universities to gather and combine a great deal of information about their students' academic preparation for undergraduate and for graduate education, their academic and other experiences while pursuing their degrees, and their
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