Family and Asian Students' Educational Performance: A Consideration of Diversity

Although researchers have illustrated the fallacy of the model minority image affixed to Asian Americans (e.g., occupational attainment), few have investigated the specific variations that exist across Asian ethnic groups and how such differences may affect both personal and family outcomes. Using a sample of Asian American students from the 1992 wave of the National Educational Longitudinal Study (NELS), the authors examine variation in educational performance among students of Chinese, Filipino, Korean, Southeast Asian, and Japanese ethnicities. Overall, they find significant differences in educational performance across these five Asian American groups. Religion, use of a non-English language at home, levels of parental education, number of siblings, family income, and the availability of educational materials in the home differentiately affected student performance. The authors' contention that grouped analyses of Asian students may provide misleading results is validated in the comparison of the resultant regression models.