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Revisiting the Explanations for Asian American Scholastic Success: A meta-analytic and
critical review
Sung won Kim
Department of Education, Yonsei University, Seoul, South Korea
Hyunsun Cho
Yonsei University, Seoul, South Korea
Minji Song
Centre for Gender Research, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Sung won Kim, Yonsei
University, Department of Education, 50 Yonsei-ro Seodaemun-gu 03722, Seoul, South
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Korea. E-mail: sungwkim@yonsei.ac.kr
Abstract
A few popular explanations attempt to argue for a weaker relationship between
socioeconomic status (SES), parental involvement (PI), and achievement among Asian
Americans compared to their white counterparts: Asian American students’ Confucian
culture, strong motivation for upward mobility as immigrants, unique forms of parental
involvement different from European Americans, and ethnic social capital. However, there
has not been a single synthesis up to date empirically testing whether the effect size for SES
and/or PI and achievement is actually weaker among Asian Americans across the body of
accumulated scholarship. In this review, we found that quantitatively, the SES-achievement
relationship was null for Asian Americans while it was positive for PI and achievement. The
current scholarship revealed several key problems.
In spite of the intuitive and appealing
cultural arguments put forward emphasizing Confucianism and immigration optimism,
our review points out that these arguments have weak empirical support, and are too
generic to be convincingly applied to Asian Americans
without any distinction by ethnicity
or generation. Furthermore, the parental involvement measures used did not effectively
capture Asian American parents’ behaviors.
Our review suggests a new comprehensive
model better integrating the Confucian and immigrant optimism explanation, developing
culturally appropriate measures of PI, distinguishing ethnic variation within Asian
American groups, and including a nuanced view on how and whether the explanations
hold across generations.
Keywords: Achievement, Asian Americans, Culture, Socioeconomic Status, Parents
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Introduction
The current scholarship has generated a large body of work explaining why Asian
American students are performing so well academically compared to other ethnic groups,
leading to the “model minority” discourse. The key question is: How and why are Asian
American students, who tend to be less socioeconomically advantaged than White ethnic
groups, able to surpass them at school? Cultural explanations of the uniformly high
achievement of Asians have been prevalent, downplaying structural factors such as
socioeconomic status. The cultural explanation outlines that Asian Americans value education
due to their Confucian beliefs that emphasize education as a moral pursuit. In addition, the
upward mobility framework explains that Asian immigrants are likely to be strongly
motivated to work hard because they self-selected to migrate to the United States for a better
life by choice, contrary to African American groups (e.g., Ogbu 1979, 1987; Ogbu and
Simons 1998). Such approach has been criticised, however, for its overwhelmingly uniform
narrative portraying and treating Asian Americans as a monolithic group characterised by
their academic success. Vivian Louie (2004) has pointed to the socioeconomic variations
among Chinese Americans: she found that the strategies to support their children’s education
differed among low-SES and high-SES families even within the same ethnic group.
Furthermore, it is unclear whether and the extent to which cultural frameworks are still
relevant today since some Asian American ethnic groups are in their third generation now,
facing very different situations and cultural contexts shaping their motivation compared to the
first wave of immigrants.
In spite of the large body of literature constructing and deconstructing the discourse
framing Asians as a “model minority” or not (“model minority myth”), empirical evidence is
very limited. Due to the difficulty of directly measuring ‘culture,’ empirical studies have
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often examined the relation between socioeconomic status (SES) or other structural variables,
and interpreted the weak SES-achievement link found in Asian American groups by
attributing them to cultural advantages. Alternatively, parental involvement (PI) in education
including but not limited to their educational aspirations for children have been used to
measure cultural emphasis on education. Leaving aside the question of whether such
approach is suitable, there has not been a single synthesis up to date empirically testing these
assumptions that are accepted without rigorous questioning.
The empirical research on SES-achievement and PI-achievement has proliferated in the
U.S. since the monumental Coleman report (1966) that found family factors to be stronger
predictors of school achievement than school resources in the United States. This has
culminated in a series of meta-analyses in the U.S. summarizing the correlations for SES-
achievement (Harwell et al. 2016; Letourneau et al. 2011; Sirin 2005; White 1982) and PI-
achievement (e.g., Fan and Chen 2001; Hill and Tyson 2009; Jeynes 2003, 2005, 2007, 2012;
Kim and Hill 2015; Wilder 2014). Unfortunately, the majority of studies group Asian
Americans with other ethnic minority groups (e.g. African American, Latino)
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and label them
as a single “minority” group (see White 1982; Sirin 2005), making it impossible to
distinguish the effect size for Asian Americans. Harwell et al. (2016) identifies such coding
decision as problematic, notably Sirin’s (2005) attempt to interpret the weaker association
between SES and achievement in the minority group, because it is impossible to say anything
about which ethnic group is driving these findings.
Harwell et al. (2016) is one of the rare studies that includes a breakdown of the effect
size by ethnicity. Harwell et al. (2016) conducted an updated meta-analysis building on
White (1982) and Sirin’s (2005) work, which included a vast number of studies overlapping
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The only exceptions are Harwell et al. (2016) and Jeynes (2003), two studies we describe in detail
subsequently.
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with White’s (1982) study (spanning approximately 6 decades, 1915-75), and a smaller
number of additional studies published between 1980 and 2010. This meta-analytic study
shows that a large number of studies reported correlations that did not include Asian
Americans at all (k= 149) or were classified as ‘unknown’ (k= 139), suggesting that they
failed to report the ethnicity. The number of correlations retrieved for Asians was very small:
Out of the 100s of correlations reported in studies published between 1915 and 2010, only 6
included a 100% Asian sample while 3 correlations were based on a sample of 0-99%
Asians.
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The number of correlations reported for the other ethnic groups was much higher,
suggesting that there might simply be fewer studies up to date reporting a separate
correlation about the SES-achievement relation for Asians. This is not surprising considering
that Asians might be a smaller ethnic minority proportionally to the U.S. population, but
points to a gap in the literature because they contribute no less to the theoretical frameworks
explaining ethnic differences in achievement.
Thus, in spite of the widespread narrative about Asian American scholastic success that
implies different patterns in association between SES, PI, and achievement compared to other
ethnic groups, the current evidence is lacking. This study sets out to conduct a systematic
review of the current research looking at the associations between SES, parental involvement,
and achievement in Asian American samples in the last thirty years. This study will (1)
synthesise the quantitative associations between SES-achievement, and PI-achievement
among Asians, and (2) investigate how the past scholarship has framed and explained this
link, critically examining the theoretical frameworks used in previous related research.
Research methodology
Literature review
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See Harwell et al. (2016).
