Acculturation and School Adjustment of Minority Students

Book excerpt: This book discusses the trajectories of minority students’ acculturation in terms of school and family-related characteristics that are influential for school adjustment of minority youths. The process that ethnic minority youth undergo while adjusting to the mainstream culture is known as acculturation. Acculturation outcomes in the school context can be measured in terms of students’ psychological well-being and their academic performance. For minority youth, family and school are the two main contexts of acculturation. The aim of the book is to provide multifaceted insights into the challenges that minority students, as well as their parents and teachers, encounter during the acculturation process, and to illustrate the interplay between school and family related factors of minority youths’ school adjustment. Research teams from Germany, Hungary, Israel, Russia, Switzerland, and USA report findings from empirical studies on acculturation and school adjustment of minority students in schools of their respective countries. This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal, Intercultural Education.