<p>THREE GROUPS:
Group 1: American student under American culture and education system.
Group 2: Asian American under American and Asian culture and American education system.
Group 3: Asian student under Asian culture and education system.</p>
<p>VARIABLES:<br>
x is a students efforts to achieve results (grade, entrance to prestigious institutions) and y is the results</p>
<p>ASSUMPTIONS:
Assumption 1: three groups x and y show normal distribution with given ave(rage) and var(iance) and y (output) is a linear function of x (input).
Assumption 2: Under American education system a students individual achievement contributes to an increase in social benefits whereas this is not always the case under the Asian education system (As explained at #88, students study hard by motivation to win the tournament for A or entrance to a prestigious institution).
Assumption 3: Under American culture a student allocates less efforts to study and more to extra-curricular activities and social and personal life, and vice versa for Asian student under Asian culture.</p>
<p>MY PREDICTIONS are as follows:
HS: ave (American) < ave (Asian American) < ave (Asian) and
var (American) > var (Asian American) > var (Asian)
but
College: ave (American) = ave (Asian American) > ave (Asian)
and var (American) < var (Asian American) < var (Asian) </p>
<p>Finally MY ARGUMENTS regarding the issue of this thread are as follows:
(1) Average efforts and performances of three groups are somewhat different because of cultural factor but we cannot reject the hypothesis that averages of three groups are same. (explored by many CCers)
(2) Group 3 students (and probably Group 2 students) face more problems than Group 1 students at college days because of social and emotional immaturity, and some students at tales of normal distribution of the Group 3 (and probably Group 2) tends to do misdemeanors.
(3) My hypothesis of #88 is the extreme case of (2).</p>
<p>OTHER ARGUMENTS:
(1) Better performances in HS of East Asian countries, shown in OECD study, are not from better education system but simply from more inputs (x), which is closely related with insufficient extra-activities and social and emotional competences at HS. This is quite different from President Obamas argument. After entrance to the colleges students do not study hard simply because graduation is largely guaranteed. This is different from American students experiencing hard training at colleges.
(2) Quality of the US Higher education is quite better than that of East Asian countries in that the US system emphasizes academic basics (liberal arts and sciences) first at colleges, then emphasizes academic or professional specialization at graduate schools. East Asian students are not fully exposed to basics of liberal arts and sciences, cultivating the mind of modern life and the ways of thinking. Instead, traditional values and ethics are emphasized without scientific approach.</p>
<p>I’m having trouble reading the order of operations in your “MY PREDICTIONS” section.</p>
<p>My experience with “Asian groups” is that this lumping together of all people from half a hemisphere is probably not that useful, except to identify the surface features and then apply stereotypical expectations from that basis – seems somewhat excessively categorical in thought processing.</p>
<p>Why not just present your opinion using typical semantics rather than use a pseudo-research journal format that is lacking in objective data?</p>
<p>Lumping all American kids together doesn’t work well, either.</p>
<p>Consider three American kids:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Kid one grew up in an affluent family in a sophisticated suburban area and attended a high school known for its academic excellence.</p></li>
<li><p>Kid two grew up in a poor family in a rough area in an inner city and went to a high school known for high crime and poor academics.</p></li>
<li><p>Kid three lives in an isolated rural area and went to a very small high school where academic opportunities were limited by the school’s size.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>They’re all American kids in the American educational system, but their experiences are very different.</p>
<p>I think, just to be contentious, on the day after Xmas, that lumping American kids together can work because the curricular system and the cultural system is relatively standardized, even though the socioeconomic brackets are not. I don’t think rural/urban has much to do with it, as much as family culture, based on anecdotal personal experience, and me living in a rural wasteland at the present time. I agree it is hard to factor in the substantial influence of the private school group(s) - the dreaded Preppies - and the magnet school groups, each of whom may have very unique school preparations separate from regular high school. I think the scale of comparison groups in OPs “study design” is disproportionate – it would be comparable to comparing “Europeans” to the Australian nation, or “Africans” to South Korea.</p>
<p>I tried to explain why Asians care about scores much more than Americans. Two factors, culture and education-system matter. </p>
<p>Group 3’s performance (y, for example SAT score) is better on average than Group 1’s because of the factors. First, allocation of more time to prepare SAT and less time to extra-curruculars and social and emotional competences than Group 1 when two group’s input the same time (x). Second,Group 3’s motivation to study (to win the tournament) is, on average, more intense than Group 1’s (to check her academic aptitude), so input more time, x, than Group 1, and get higher SAT scores, y, on average.</p>
<p>I also consider socio-economic factors and individual differences. Because of this, each group’s y’s and x’s (SAT Score and studying time) are assumed to be normally distributed. Like your example kid 1’s score tends to be higher than kid 2’s and 3’s within the each group. My assumption is that socioeconomic and individual factors MATTER but CANNOT EXPLAIN DIFFERENCES in SAT scores (average y of each group’s distribution function) and studying time (average x of each group’s distribution function) BETWEEN THE GROUPS.</p>
<p>You can’t lump “Asians” together. I worked in a refugee/ESL school for several years with students from several DIFFERENT (often less represented) Asian countries. Thai, Japanese, Burmese, Bengali, Cambodian, Malaysian, etc children were as different, culturally, from one another as American students are from Chinese students.</p>
<p>coolweather,
The idea of this post is from a PhD dissertation of Columbia University several years ago. I tried to explain the main idea using simplistic statistics (normal distribution with average and variance) but realized I was failed to do so.</p>
<p>(1) If you can figure out PREDICTIONS of #1, graphing the density functions of the three groups with different averages and variances, you can understand my point clearly. </p>
<p>(2) Not-relevant-unnecessary allegation continues, I’ll close this thread.</p>
<p>What’s your outcome measure? There’s your bias right there. Not everyone would agree that higher SAT scores (accompanied by being less well-rounded) is a “better outcome.” Or that admission to the highest-end college is the supreme goal for everyone. You are, of course, free to think that a 2400 SAT and admission to Harvard is what everyone unilaterally shoots for, but that’s not realistic. Admission to Harvard et al is a goal for a relatively small % of the American student population, so “failing” to achieve that isn’t a “failure” for most American students who don’t have one iota’s worth of interest in that in the first place.</p>
<p>I guess my question is –
leaving aside the many issues of lumping “Asians” together as a monolithic group for the sake of argument …</p>
<p>You could come at it two ways.
One is … Asians are genuinely smarter than Americans (as measured by SAT scores, and let’s pretend we all agree on that measure), regardless of work ethic.
OR … Asians are no more inherently smarter, but their work ethic and cultural background carries through to more intense studying and hence higher SAT scores.</p>
<p>What difference does it make from a policy standpoint if either of those things are true? What are the implications? Personally I don’t see what difference it makes if Asians are smarter inherently or by dint of hard work. Good for them either way.</p>
<p>(1) I totally agree with your opinion. American HSers’ goal for study is not high SAT score or admission to the highest-end college except for a few students (the share of those students in total is really small number). American students know there are lots of life and career paths and they know lots of ways to prepare the individual long-term goal at different colleges even in the group who want to get higher education. However it is somewhat different in the case of Korean HSers. Quite large percentage of Korean students work very hard to get higher scores at Korean SAT exam and to get admission to better colleges with basic functions and goals of education sometimes ignored. Thus, I hypothesize that motivation for study for them is to win the tournament. Actually all of them are losers of the game triggered by backward education system.
In this point your comment is consistent with #2 of MY OTHER ARGUMENTS of the first post. </p>
<p>(2) Now we assume that y variable is performance at college rather than SAT score, and assume that one American student and one Korean student (graduated from Korean HS), who has almost same socio-economic and individual background and academic capability, take the same lecture at the same American college. Who does show better performance? As most CCers think, we don’t know exactly. But it is certain that two students spent HS days under different cultural and education system, and that PROBABILITY of Korean student reaching at the same level of social skills, emotional and self-management skills (and critical thinking skills) as American SHOULD BE LOW, because they allocate more time to study instead of extra-curriculars and critical thinking on life and society during HS. In other words, Korean student suddenly face more difficulties than American to show the same performance at colleges, and she does’n know how to deal with even this is the really rare case at the distribution of probability.</p>
<p>Yes, this hypothesis can be applied to two American students who has different socio-economic background. The probability of success (graduation or better GPA) of one student with adversary environment should be lower than student with better background simply because of more challenges they have to overcome than the other. However, we know that most of them are late bloomers and this is considered at holistic admission process.</p>
<p>Policy implications?
Frankly speaking I am not in serious thinking. But I know many colleges provide some special services for those students overcoming challenges. I believe this is also an important determinant of quality of undergraduate education.</p>
<p>The study you propose in post #15 would fail to show anything because if you are making statements about Korean students and not just self selecting a particular population you would have to include north Korean students in your study.</p>
<p>what does this even mean? Sounds like something from a bad college brochure. </p>
<p>As to the rest of the post, it is typical hogwash that all Koreans are the same, all Americans are the same and there is no variability in the the education systems of both countries.</p>
<p>Would be great if people could judge people based on the content of their character rather than their race or which education system they participated in. “Analysis” based on stereotypes is ridiculous and a set back to modern life and the ways of thinking.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Now that is funny. Do you believe that a student at TJ studies less than a student at Tongyeong High School? Really??</p>
<p>And by the same token, does American education system include Adderall, Ritalin, Concerta, Vyvanse, Dexedrine, Quillivant, Metadate, and Methylin?</p>