As researchers working in different subareas within human-computer interaction, we have been keen to explore alternative approaches to designing with communities. In particular, we are enthusiastic about moving away from focusing on a community's needs toward building on its strengths. However, our varied experiences with assets-based design across contexts have also unearthed two fundamental questions: *What is the right thing to do?* and *How do we know we have done it?*
In Cameroon, no exam is more important than the baccalauréat, which serves as the gateway to professional and higher-education aspirations. We build on existing literature on practice tests to evaluate how SMS-based quizzes could help students prepare for the baccalauréat. We find that students used our practice tests for formative assessment, as a prompt for recall and review of study material, and as a focus of collaborative study sessions.
We created a system to send regularly-spaced, multiple-choice questions to students' own mobile devices to help secondary school students in Cameroon with exam practice via either SMS or WhatsApp. Students' participation rates were heavily impacted by trust in the intervening organization and perceptions of personal security in the socio-technical environment. WhatsApp-based users had significantly lower participation as compared to SMS.
Research situated in non-Western contexts continues to be exceptionalized and marginalized in Computing venues. This exceptionalizing creates power differences that result in additional labor of self-location performed by the periphery in order to be understood by researchers situated in Western contexts. Increasing self-location in research on nonperipheral populations is one way to address this marginalization.
Testing interventions that can support Cameroonian youth as they transition from school to work.
America experienced remarkable assimilation of the descendants of disadvantaged European immigrants who came to the United States in the early 20th Century and became part of the mainstream middle-class. In recent decades, new sociological theories have risen to try to explain the much slower process of assimilation experienced by recent immigrants. A key issue is the relationship between cultural and socioeconomic assimilation. In this work, I use data from the Beyond High School study to examine the effects of acculturation and peer and parent expectations on the higher educational aspirations and attainment of the children of immigrants relative to comparable youth of native born parents. I frame these results in the lens of Classical Assimilation Theory, Segmented Assimilation, and Immigrant Optimism Hypothesis, and find most support for the latter.