By TOM JACOBS, PACIFIC STANDARD
Why do Asian Americans, as a group, tend to excel at academics?
Portrait Of A Student. (Photo by Education Images/UIG via Getty Images)
Newly published research arrives at a simple answer: They work harder than their non-Asian peers.
The study also attempts to answer the less-simple question of why these kids tend to put more effort into their studies, and comes up with two likely answers: The culturally based belief that effort leads to achievement, and the fact that recent immigrants are highly motivated to succeed.
Writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, sociologists Amy Hsin of Queens College and Yu Xie of the University of Michigan analyze data from two nationally representative studies: The Kindergarten Cohort of the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, which tracks children who entered kindergarten in 1998; and the Educational Longitudinal Study, which looked at the habits and achievements of high school students who were sophomores in 2004.
The first group of kids was tracked through eighth grade; their scores were based on their teachers’ assessment of their proficiency in reading, math, and general knowledge, as well as their “attentiveness, task persistence, and eagerness to learn.”
The high school students’ scores were based on their grade point averages and performance on standardized tests. In addition, their teachers reported their level of attentiveness in class, and noted whether they felt “the student works hard for his/her grades.”
The researchers report that the achievement gap between Asian American and white American kids starts off as small to non-existent, but gradually grows, peaking in 10th grade. This suggests the difference reflects “academic effort rather than differences in cognitive ability,” they write.
Crunching the numbers further, they find socioeconomic factors, such as the fact that Asian Americans kids “are more likely to live in stable, two-parent families with higher incomes,” explains “almost none of the overall Asian-white gap in academic effort.”
So what does make a difference? The researchers find that “differences in immigration status” are the biggest factor, followed by “differences in cultural orientation.”
“Regardless of ethnicity,” they write, “immigrants are self-selected in terms of their motivation to succeed and their optimism for future success.”
Read the full article HERE.
