ABSTRACT
The academic success of Chinese-, Korean-, and Japanese-American students has been well established in large-scale quantitative studies such as High School and Beyond, and in smaller, more qualitative field-based investigations (Coleman, Hoffer, & Kilgore, 1982; Matute-Bianchi, 1986; Peng, Owings, & Fetters, 1984; Schneider & Lee, 1990; Tsang, 1988; Wong, 1980). Consistently, East Asian-American students outperform their Euro-American counterparts on standard achievement tests. Similar results are found when comparing the academic performance of U.S. students with their peers in other East-Asian countries (Garden, 1987; Husen, 1967; Stevenson et al., 1990; Stevenson, Lee, & Stigler, 1986). Although these differences in academic performance among different groups are documented, few investigators have attempted to explore what accounts for the success of particular minority groups. (A notable exception is Stevenson, Lee, Chen, Stigler et al. 1990.)
