Although studies have found some preliminary evidence that parental involvement and students' home environment have salutary effects on students' school achievements, further research is needed in the field of early childhood education. Previous studies mostly targeted middle childhood immigrant students or adolescents while very few studies involved immigrant young children. Students' early school experience is crucial for their future school success but early childhood experience has been overlooked by researchers to focus on immigrant young children's school achievements. Therefore, this study targeted kindergarteners to investigate the related predictors and indicators of their school achievements. Immigrant young children are sensitively influenced by various factors occurring at the individual, family, community, and social contexts. To understand immigrant young children's school achievements, it is necessary to identify the multiple predictors and indicators that surrounded the children. In addition, it is essential to investigate dynamic interactions among predictors. Thus, this study utilized integrated models, which included a structural equation model and mediation model to find the interactions among predictors and factors of Asian and Hispanic immigrant kindergarteners' school achievements.

Data for this study were drawn from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten (ECLS-K), conducted by the U.S. Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). Participants in this study were 4105 children who attended full-day and part-day kindergarten programs in public and private schools during the 1998-1999 school years. Participants were composed of 3005 Hispanic (73.3%, includes both designating a specific race and that are not) and 1100 Asian (26.7%). To identify indicators and predictors of children' achievement tests, the study utilized structural equation model and mediation model.

Structural equation modeling (SEM) tested the hypotheses with using AMOS 5.0. Seven major findings were addressed in this study: (a) home environment and parental involvement were important predictors of kindergarteners' school achievements; (b) parental school involvement had no mediating effects in the relation between home environment and kindergarteners' school achievements; (c) Hispanic immigrant parents were more involved in school activities than that of Asian parents; (d) Overall scores of Asian immigrant kindergarteners were higher than those of Hispanic students; (e) Asian immigrant families provided higher quality home environment than those of Hispanic families (f) Asian immigrant kindergarteners had higher SES than that of Hispanic students; and (g) In terms of number of households, no statistically significant correlation was found between Asian and Hispanic families.

Policy, curriculum, and practical implications include targeting academic skills and socio-economic competencies for immigrant children and their parents based on the findings of this study will be presented. It is important to view these comparative findings in a "culturally variant," multicultural framework that appreciates that families from different ethnic or cultural backgrounds are often qualitatively different from one another and that as social work scholars and practitioners we should value and build on the unique strengths across ethnic groups.