The Determinants of Academic Performance: Hong Kong Immigrant Students in Canadian Schools
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT/RESUME Using the concepts of financial capital, human capital, and social capital, this article attempts to disentangle the major factors which affected the academic performance of 368 recent Hong Kong immigrant students attending 26 different public high schools in Toronto. Results of the ordinary-least square regression analysis indicated that presence of father in Canada, higher self-rated socio-economic status, immigration to Canada being politically motivated, and higher level of English proficiency were significantly and positively related to academic performance. A partir des concepts de capital financier, capital humain et capital social, cet article vise a degager les principaux facteurs qui affectent la performance academique de 368 etudiants immigres recemment de Hong Kong et inscrits dans 26 ecoles secondaires publiques differentes de Toronto. Les resultats d'une analyse de regression revelent que la presence du pere au Canada, le statut socio-economique eleve. l'immigration au Canada motive par des facteurs politiques de meme que le niveau eleve d'habiletes en anglais sont positivement et significativement relies a la performance academique. INTRODUCTION Educational success is one of the primary goals that immigrant students strive to attain. The importance of educational values and work orientation as an aspect of the Chinese culture is widely recognized. There is a wealth of studies documenting the extra-ordinary educational attainment of the Asian population, including the Chinese, in the United States (e.g., Chen & Stevenson, 1995; Mizokakawa & Ryckman, 1990; Stevenson et al., 1985). As academic performance is generally regarded as an early indicator of success for immigrant students and serves as a preparation for the future in a career, educational researchers and practitioners have long been interested in understanding the link between students' family background and academic performance (e.g., Astone & McLanahan, 1991; Reitzes & Mutran, 1980; Valenzuela & Dornbusch, 1994). Family background, according to Coleman (1988), is analytically separable into at least three distinct components: financial capital, human capital, and social capital. More specifically, physical resources that aid achievement, which is commonly measured by the family's wealth or income, are considered as financial capital. Human capital, which constitutes the potential for a cognitive environment that is conducive to children's learning, is usually measured by parents' education. Social capital is the least tangible as it exists only in the relationships among persons and is defined by its function. In view of the paucity of research on the academic performance of immigrant students in Canada and the continual influx of Chinese immigrants to this country,' this analysis fills a gap in the literature by examining the factors associated with the academic performance of Hong Kong immigrant high school students in Toronto. METHODOLOGY This analysis is based on data from a larger study which investigated the adaptation experiences of immigrant students from Hong Kong (see Chow, 1997). A total of 368 Hong Kong immigrant students attending 26 public high schools in Metro Toronto participated in this study by completing a self-administered questionnaire. The two major eligibility criteria for participation in the study included length of residence in Canada being less than five years and legal status in Canada being a permanent resident (i.e., landed immigrant or citizen). The sample comprised 176 male (48.0 percent) and 191 female (52.0 percent) students, with a mean age of 17.8 (SD=2.8). Prior to emigration, about three-quarters of the sample (75.2 percent) had completed secondary education (i.e., Forms 1-5) and slightly more than a third of the students (34.0 percent) attended high schools in which English was the primary medium of instruction. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".