By Eloy Ortiz, MURP, & Yethzéll Díaz  | August 25, 2015

Math Pathways is a longitudinal study that aims to understand how relationships influence Latino students’ mathematics beliefs and achievement during the critical transition from elementary to middle school. Our goal was to recruit and survey 300 mother-child pairs from a rural, predominantly Latino farming community at four different time points over 18 months. Over the process of designing, implementing and refining our recruitment and retention efforts, we have established best-practice standards that have contributed substantially to our retention success.

Gathering the data for this research study has involved three major efforts: recruitment, scheduling and data collection. Here, we highlight a few of the practices that have stood out during the implementation of the project.