s******n
发帖数: 2279 | 1 http://www.miller-mccune.com/culture-society/asian-american-parenting-and-academic-success-26053/
By Kathy Seal
Why do so many Asian-American kids do so well in school?
Researchers are zeroing in on one important reason: the unique style of
Asian-American parenting.
A visit to the University of California’s most selective campuses shows how
very well Asian-American kids do academically: While Asian Americans
constituted 14 percent of the state population in 2008, this fall they made
up about 40 percent of the freshman class at UCLA and 37 percent of the
entering class at University of California, Berkeley.
But it’s not just in California, and it’s not just in college. The 2000
Census found that 44 percent of Asian Americans had a bachelor’s degree,
compared with 26 percent of the white population. Their outsize presence in
higher education — critics charge some universities with enforcing tacit
Asian-American quotas — has made their success legend.
In the latest report of scores from the National Assessment of Educational
Progress, standardized tests administered to U.S. elementary and secondary
students, finds Asian-American students have overtaken white students’
scores in reading at the high school senior level. Asian Americans had
already topped white scores at the fourth-grade level in 2007 and the eighth
-grade level in 2009.
Of course, there are many ethnic subgroups of Asian Americans. So a word of
statistical caution: Research on parenting practices has mostly focused on
East Asians — Chinese, Japanese and Koreans. University of California and U
.S. Census statistics, on the other hand, include many other smaller
subgroups, such as Filipinos, South and Southeast Asians, Indonesians and
Pacific Islanders.
It’s also important to note that some Asian-American academic success is a
product of U.S. immigration policy. Many high-performing Asian-American
students have well-educated and relatively wealthy parents, admitted to the
U.S. “because of the assets they were able to bring to this country,” says
Robert Teranishi, associate professor of higher education at NYU.
In that vein, many students whose Vietnamese, Cambodian and Laotian (
including Hmong and Mien peoples) parents are less well-off don’t finish
high school, adds Teranishi, author of the just-published Asians in the
Ivory Tower.
But these sociological facts don’t fully explain the huge success of Asian-
American kids in American schools. Over the past two decades, a spate of
studies has examined the cultural beliefs that shape Asian-American
parenting, and their effect on kids’ learning. They describe a style of
parental involvement that results in Asian-American kids spending more time
studying than other kids.
One study, for example, found that Asian-American 11th-graders studied six
hours more per week than their white peers. Another found that in 2007, more
than two-thirds of Asian-American high school students did homework five or
more days a week, while only about 40 percent of white and Hispanic kids,
and less than a third of African-American students, did so. According to
other research, Asian-American kids devote less time to chores, part-time
jobs and dating than other kids.
Behind these differences lie Confucian beliefs, say researchers including
University of California, Riverside, psychologist Ruth Chao and Brown
University psychologist Jin Li. The 5th-century B.C.E. philosopher taught
that human beings should strive their whole lifetime to improve or perfect
themselves. Confucian “self-perfection” means achieving the virtues of
diligence, perseverance and concentration, explains Li, who adds that
Confucian ideas influence most East Asian cultures, particularly Korea,
Japan, Vietnam in addition to Singapore, Hong Kong and Taiwan.
In these cultures, this goal of self-improvement still holds sway: While a
majority of white college students surveyed by Li defined knowledge as facts
, information, skill and understanding of the world, 79 percent of the
Chinese college students defined it as “a way to self-perfection” and “
spiritual enrichment.”
Transmitted down through the generations, this “moral mandate” for self-
improvement “has tremendous motivational impact,” the Brown psychologist
says.
Such veneration of diligence helps account for the widespread Asian belief
that when striving for academic success, effort counts more than innate
ability.
American students of most ethnicities, the researchers found, tend to
believe the reverse, often arguing that gifted people are so smart they don
’t have to work as hard as others do. Americans also often think that we’
re born smart or not — with a fixed intelligence — while Asians more often
believe that studying makes a person smarter. As one high-achieving Chinese
-American student told Li, “Everybody in my family, all my aunts and uncles
and cousins, they’re all like, ‘If you try harder, you’d be like a
really smart person.’”
Li showed that even preschoolers value effort and ability differently
according to their culture when she asked 95 white Americans and 93 mainland
Chinese 4- to 6-year-olds to finish a story about a bird learning how to
catch fish. The white children tended to mention the bird’s ability and
strategies (“She needs to know how to catch fish first,” said one.)
The Chinese children, on the other hand, commented more on the bird’s
diligence, persistence and concentration. “Little Bear can never catch fish
if she stays with three hearts and two minds,” said one. “He fell, but he
is not afraid, and starts all over again until the end,” said another.
Both the Chinese and Japanese cultures also embrace the idea that children
are like seedlings, and need parental shaping and trimming as they grow. (
Japanese uses the same character for “cultivating” a plant and a person.)
Parents shouldn’t start training children too young — the seedling has to
sprout — but early habits will dominate, goes the common conviction. That’
s why 60 percent of Asian-American parents in one study by Michigan State
University education professor Barbara Schneider taught their preschoolers
basic reading, writing and math, hoping also to imbue them with perseverance
, concentration and focus.
In contrast, 16 percent of whites surveyed taught their preschoolers those
basic skills. Many explained that they didn’t want to push academics on
their preschoolers because they worried about “baby burnout” — squelching
their toddlers’ motivation with too-early teaching.
Confucius also valued harmonious relations, achieved when people fulfill the
responsibilities of their hierarchical roles. That means children owe
respect and obedience — “filial piety” — to their parents, who in turn
must “govern, teach and discipline” them responsibly and justly, explains
Chao, author of a seminal 1994 article published by the journal Child
Development. That translates, she says, into children honoring their family
by succeeding in school. Parents in turn deem their top parental
responsibility is educating their children well.
Chinese parents carry out this responsibility by relying on the notion of
guan — which literally means “to govern” or “control” — but also
denotes “to care for” and even “to love.”
“Guan,” Chao explains, “is about guiding and managing children and their
behavior and their lives.”
The chief aim of guan is to guide kids to get a good education, especially
since until the early 20th century scholarship in China led to politically
and economically powerful government posts. Asian-American parents still
value education extremely highly, telling their children, “Education is the
only means to a good life.”
“Particularly for East Asians,” Chao says, “their efficacy in parenting
is judged by how well their children do in school.”
Such cultural beliefs and responsibilities lend Asian-American parents’
involvement in their children’s education a particular style, as Chao found
when she compared the practices of 123 immigrant Chinese and 64 white
parents of first-, second- and third-graders from four Los Angeles school
districts. Did they check their children’s homework? Go to PTA meetings?
Volunteer in the classroom? Watch them in sports or other extracurricular
activities? Buy them extra workbooks?
While the white parents tended to emphasize “hands-on” supervision —
checking up on homework, attending school meetings and watching their kids
in extracurricular activities — the Chinese parents spent more time on
creating an educational environment in the home. They gave their kids a
place to study, as well as extra homework, books and computer programs, and
took them to music lessons and Saturday language and culture school.
After the elementary years, this difference becomes even starker.
As early as fifth or sixth grade, many Asian-American parents expect that
their children will know how to organize themselves and study on their own,
and by high school that feeling is almost universal, Chao says.
But as Chao found when she followed 2,111 ninth-graders through their
sophomore and junior years, the Asian-American parents gave their high
school kids far more indirect support at home than did their white
counterparts. They focus more on college planning and preparation like SAT
and ACT courses, and save more money for college.
“They’re talking about possible majors, asking ‘Where are you going to
apply?’ and visiting colleges,” Chao says. “They’re proactively planning
for the next step.”
Even low-income Asian-American families provide a great deal of indirect,
out-of-school support, Li found when she studied 32 Massachusetts ninth-
graders whose Chinese immigrant parents worked as cooks, custodians, shelf
stockers and nursing home aides.
While few of these parents checked their children’s homework or attended
school meetings, they networked with co-workers and other parents, and
relied on an older sibling or another relative for tutoring and academic
advice. The parents also talked up role models, which Li found gave their
kids a sense of confidence rather than creating jealousy or competitiveness.
The students’ GPAs averaged 3.27.
“Some kids said, ‘Oh that’s annoying. I wish my parents wouldn’t do that
,” Li explains.
“Then we asked, ‘Does that help you in any way to work harder?’ They said
, ‘Yes it does.’ We wouldn’t expect this answer from European-American
kids. This surprised us.”
Li concluded that these students understood how much their parents
sacrificed for their education, and also that their parents conveyed — like
sports coaches yelling “Do it!” on the sidelines — that they’re capable
of achieving.
“[That] really drove home how they come to terms with this kind of bugging,
” says Li, who adds that she doesn’t know if kids with higher-income
parents would react the same way.
Furthermore, these low-income parents expected relatives to join in
exercising guan. “Be good in school,” one high-achieving boy said his
grandmother and uncles often urged him. “Don’t do anything stupid, do all
your homework.” | s******n
发帖数: 2279 | 2 The Christian Science Monitor - CSMonitor.com
Why Shanghai schooled the US: Americans think they're too smart to work hard
Unlike their Asian peers, American students tend to measure success by
innate ability instead of hard work. But China's (and Asia's) powerhouse
performance on a recently released standardized test put American students
– and their work ethic – to shame.
By Jonathan Zimmerman
posted December 14, 2010 at 2:29 pm EST
New York —
Are you smart? I mean, really smart? Like, so smart that you don’t really
have to work?
Then you’re kidding yourself. And your belief in your own intelligence is
holding you back.
That’s the real story behind the latest piece of bad news in American
education, which continues to stack up poorly next to other nations. On a
standardized test administered to 15-year-olds in over 60 countries, the US
came in 17th in reading, 23rd in science, and 31st in math.
West loses edge to Asia in education: Top five OECD findings
Meanwhile, Asian countries clustered near the top. Students in Shanghai,
China, nearly ran the table, scoring first in the world in all three tested
subject areas – science, math, and reading. But Japan, South Korea,
Singapore, and Hong Kong all outperformed America, as well, on all three
tests.
Hard work vs. intelligence
Why? Politicians and pundits fingered the usual suspects: our schools.
Whereas Asian countries demand rigor and hard work from their students, the
theory goes, our own schools have gone soft. Witness the larger number of
school days in most Asian countries, the stricter academic requirements, the
greater volume of homework, and so on.
There’s something to that. Asian students do work harder, by every measure
we can find. But there’s more to it than that. Put simply, Asians believe
that hard work is the prime determinant of their success. By contrast,
Americans and other Westerners typically ascribe academic performance to
innate ability.
And that’s a fool’s game. For the more we believe in “smarts,” the less
likely we are to persist in a task. If you’re “good at” a subject like
math, to borrow another favorite American phrase, then you don’t really
have to try; and if you’re not good at it, there’s no use in trying to get
better.
Are you smarter than a 12th-grader? A reading comprehension quiz.
Consider a 2001 experiment by Canadian researchers, who administered
creativity tests to Japanese and Canadian college students. Regardless of
how the students performed, the researchers told some of them that they had
done well and others that they did poorly. The researchers then gave the
students a similar test and told them to spend as much time on it as they
wished.
The Canadians worked harder on the second test if they were told they had
succeeded on the first one. They were “good at it,” and that gave them the
confidence to continue. Failing students were not “good at it,” meanwhile
, so they put in less work. But the Japanese worked longer on the second
test if they had failed the first one! They interpreted their initial
setback as a function of weak effort, not of ability, so they re-applied
themselves to the task instead of blowing it off.
Too much praise?
Or consider a now-famous 1998 experiment by psychologists Claudia Mueller
and Carol Dweck, who told American children they had done well on a test and
then praised some for being smart, others for working hard. They then gave
both sets of kids the chance to work on another test – either easy or hard.
About 66 percent of the children who were praised for their intelligence
chose the easy problems, while 90 percent of the kids praised for hard work
selected the more difficult ones. In subsequent exercises, the "smart" kids
performed worse, and the “hard working” kids did better. The smart kids
were also more likely to attribute their wrong answers to a lack of ability,
while the kids praised for hard work blamed their own lack of effort when
they failed.
Are you smarter than an NFL quarterback? Take the quiz
The moral of these stories seems clear: If you want kids to succeed, don’t
talk about their intelligence. That will only hold them back.
And it does. I’ve been a teacher for nearly 30 years, and I’ve seen
students try to hide how much schoolwork they do. I mean, if they have to
work that hard, how smart can they be?
Americans like to say that their country is a land of opportunity; that
anyone can make it, if they just try hard enough. But our educational system
tells another story altogether. By emphasizing who is smart – and who is
not – we teach our kids that their inborn capabilities are more important
than their sweat and toil.
Persistent achievement gap vexes education reformers: Six takeaways
So why should we be surprised when the kids don’t try? Sure, our schools
should ask more of our students. But we also need to ask why they don’t,
and what role our flawed ideas about intelligence play in the answer. To
paraphrase Shakespeare: the fault, dear Americans, lies not just in our
schools. It’s in ourselves.
Jonathan Zimmerman teaches education and history at New York University. He
is the author, most recently, of “Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse
in History and Memory.” | s*****r
发帖数: 1032 | 3 Good read. Although Asian American parent has a lot to learn from the
western education philosophy, there are some merits in its own style. As an
Asian American parent, one would probably wish the success measures
performed only in schools. | r*d
发帖数: 750 | 4 学习好确实是一个人一生中比较容易做到的事情。
an
【在 s*****r 的大作中提到】
: Good read. Although Asian American parent has a lot to learn from the
: western education philosophy, there are some merits in its own style. As an
: Asian American parent, one would probably wish the success measures
: performed only in schools.
| r*d
发帖数: 750 | 5 这个观点有些道理。
http://news.yahoo.com/s/csm/20101214/cm_csm/349798
These tests are worthless, most of these nations in the top tiers do not
make an effort to educate every child, like we do in the USA. If the tests
were all inclusive I may give a hoot, but since they are not it's not an
effective sampling of all students like the media would like you to believe.
第一篇里面的东亚裔孩子在学校表现好的原因文章说的很清楚了，有意思的是关键原因
是“勤奋比天资更重要”与大家常说的东亚人聪明不符，不过认识到“勤奋比天资更重
要”也许才是真正的聪明。 |
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