Overview

There is very little empirical research examining academic success in internationally adopted children and adolescents. We pursued this research in order to learn more about internationally adopted students’ experiences in school, so that parents and educators can provide appropriate supports and resources.

Internationally adopted children and adolescents confront all of the typical experiences (both positive and negative!) associated with growing up. In addition, international adoptees often also have other life-events that they need to process and work through; some of these include:

  • Coming to terms with being adopted
  • Ethnic and racial identity
  • Cultural identity
  • Trauma that may have been experienced prior to or after adoption
  • Feelings of abandonment
  • Having to adapt to another language
  • And many more

It is important to understand that the results we report on this webpage were generated from the students and parents who agreed to participate in our study. We describe our sample in detail, but please understand that these results represent statistical summaries for the participants; there are many interesting trends in the data, but this is not a nationally representative sample, so these results do not represent all internationally adopted students in the United States.

On the right hand side of this page, you will see a list of topics that we examined in this study.  You can click on any of these links to see some of our results.

If you have any questions about the study, please contact Dr. Eric Anderman (anderman.1@osu.edu).

We are grateful to the countless groups and organizations that assisted us in this research, and provided us with opportunities to announce this study to families.