Chapter 5: The Academic And Cultural Demands-Resources (Acd-R) Framework: A Lens for Understanding and Supporting Immigrant Students’ Academic Development

Nations around the world continue to experience steep rises in their immigrant populations, including their immigrant student populations. There are many successes, but there are also substantial numbers of immigrant students who underachieve, drop out of school, and miss out on critical post-school education opportunities (Cutmore et al., 2018). Helping immigrant students to navigate the academic barriers facing them, whilst also supporting them to leverage the educational opportunities available, will enhance their academic development. In this chapter, the recently developed “academic and cultural demands-resources” (ACD-R) framework (Martin &Collie, 2022; Martin et al., 2024, 2025) is applied as a lens for understanding and supporting immigrant students’ academic development. Most research investigating immigrant students’ academic outcomes has been somewhat atheoretical and the ACD-R framework is suggested as an integrative lens to guide understanding of and research into immigrant students’ educational experiences. As is described in detail below,the ACD-R draws from the classic “job demands-resources” (JD-R) theory (Bakker &Demerouti, 2017; Bakker et al., 2023; Demerouti et al., 2019; Schaufeli &Bakker, 2004; for other academic-related adaptations, see Bakker &Mostert, 2024; Lesener et al., 2020; Salmela-Aro et al., 2022) to posit academic, personal, and cultural demands and resources that impact the academic development of students from ethno-culturally diverse backgrounds (Martin &Collie, 2022; Martin et al., 2024, 2025). Figure 5.1 shows the hypothesized process.