The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has awarded a grant to Professor Vikki Katz of Rutgers University to carry out research on how low-income Latino families in the U.S. may adopt and use technology to help the next generation grow and learn.

As internet technology continues to expand its reach into U.S. homes and improve the speed, quality, and the number of ways that an ever-increasing plethora of devices can take advantage of the interconnected world of information, the "digital divide" -- the split between technological haves and have-nots -- slowly diminishes in breadth.

However, for those Americans who still cannot afford (or simply access) technology -- including many low-income Latino families -- that divide deepens, as internet technology progressively becomes fully integrated into American life. This can impact a family's ability to take part in their communities (and the world) in many ways, leading to consequences their children's health care and education.

One professor at New Jersey-based Rutgers University plans to understand how. Vikki Katz, assistant professor of communication at the Rutgers School of Communication and Information, is leading a new research project called "Leveraging Technology for Learning in U.S. Latino Families."

Her aim, according to Rutgers Today, is to study how low-income Latino families in America "make decisions about adopting and engaging technology for a range of learning purposes." Said Katz, "Our goal is to enable national and local leaders to make more informed decisions and develop policies that can fulfill the promise of learning technologies for our nation's most vulnerable students and their families."

Katz isn't going about this long-term project without any support -- on top of aid from the Rutgers School of Communication and Information, partners, and colleagues, the very well endowed Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have awarded Katz with a two-year $623,035 grant.

The project will be carried out in three stages: First, Katz will initiate a "qualitative study" of how low-income Latino families respond to programs, both nationally and locally initiated, to increase access in technology. The second part involves a nationally representative survey of U.S. Latino parents to obtain their views on technology adoption, digital access, and learning. The final stage will be when Katz circulates her project's findings nationally to inform policy-makers and other programs about the state of low-income U.S. Latino families and the digital divide.

"We are focusing on U.S. Latino families with children in elementary and middle school because it is critical for all parents -- especially for parents with limited formal education - to develop joint media engagement practices with their children early on in their schooling," said Katz. Those Latino families will be chosen in Arizona, California, and Texas.

Other more general studies have been done on U.S. Latino families and their views of technology, but Katz's research project a specific goal in mind:

"Meaningful engagement with technology is increasingly crucial to formal and informal learning for children, but also for parents, "said Katz. "To understand how digital equity programs can best enable low-income U.S. Latino families to leverage technologies to achieve their own goals, we first need to understand how families respond to current programs."