Cross-National Differences in Academic Achievement: Beyond Etic Conceptions of Children's Understandings

'The Kids are Doing All Right': Differences in parental satisfaction, expectation and attribution in St Petersburg, Sunderland and

“…Bempechat & Drago-Severson (1999), for example, criticise aspects of Stevenson's work and suggest that his claim is not supported by others' or, indeed, his own ndings. They cite ndings from the Third International Science and Maths Study (TIMSS) (Beaton et al, 1996b) that demonstrated strong beliefs in effort on the part of North American and English children, and contrast these with the lower 'effort' rating of several successful Paci c Rim countries.…”

“…Parental expectations are in uenced by the actual performance of their children (Seginer, 1993;Sonuga-Barke et al, 1995), although how this is interpreted will be conditioned by broad-brush understandings of what is appropriate within any given culture. Finally, we need to be aware that empirical ndings in the eld of motivation (including those from the present study) have largely been derived from relatively crude tools of measurement (Bempechat & Drago-Severson, 1999). Surveys and questionnaires, while useful for providing a broad-brush picture, run the risk of providing a somewhat super cial and simplistic account of beliefs and behaviours (Hufton et al, in press, b; Bempechat & Elliott, in press).…”

Cross-Cultural Study of Education

“…For example, in Western countries, empirical findings typically find student self-perceptions (e.g., self-concept, self-efficacy) to be a strong predictor of individuals' effort, cognitive engagement, academic achievement, and subjective well-being (Bandura, 1997;Linnenbrink and Pintrich, 2003). Paradoxically, however, it is typically found that in Eastern countries, lower levels of selfconcept or self-efficacy are oftentimes a better predictor of academic performance (Klassen, 2004a,b;Leung, 2001;Mau, 2000).…”

“…It is important to note, however, that it may be somewhat premature to make crosscultural generalizations about attributional style. For example, Bempechat and colleagues caution that Asian students do not always emphasize effort over ability, and that ability attributions may play a more significant role in explaining Asian and Asian-American students' academic performance (Bempechat and Drago-Severson, 1999;Choi et al, 1994). Western students, too, appear to emphasize effort over ability at times; British children in particular have been noted to attribute success in school to effort rather than ability (Gipps and Tunstall, 1998;Lightbody et al, 1996).…”

“…Elliott et al (1999) also found English and American students to report effort to be a major determinant of their academic success; it was noted, however, that these students' commitments to educational endeavors were generally less strong than those of their Russian counterparts. Furthermore, Bempechat and her colleagues generally suggest ability attributions to be a better predictor of academic achievement than effort attributions (Bempechat and Drago-Severson, 1999;Bempechat et al, 1996), pointing to empirical findings that demonstrate that effort attributions are typically either negatively related or unrelated to academic achievement (Holloway, 1988;Marsh, 1984).…”