Multicultural Background Students’ Academic Achievement and Influencing Factors

A Comparative Longitudinal Approach on Academic Self-Concept and Academic Achievement of Students From Multicultural Families

“…Students from non-multicultural backgrounds have higher academic achievement including Korean, math, and English, as well as academic self-concept. It corresponds with previous research showing that students from multicultural families have lower academic achievement (Oh, & Kim, 2005;Nam, & Kim, 2011). The finding is also plausible that there is a difference in academic self-concept between the two groups, based on the fact that there is a significant relation between academic self-concept and academic achievement (Marsh, 2007).…”

“…Previous studies reported various influencing factors to academic achievement of students from multicultural backgrounds in South Korea. Oh and Kim (2005) found that region, peer relationship, and private tutoring have a significant effect on the student's academic achievement. Similarly, Nam and Kim (2011) demonstrated student's variables such as Korean language skills, nationality, the years of residence, gender have a significant effect on academic achievement of students from multicultural backgrounds.…”

“…Previous studies have demonstrated that academic achievement of students from multicultural families is lower than that of students from non-multicultural families (Lee. J., 2013;Nam, & Kim, 2011;Oh, & Kim, 2005). The gap appeared in all school ages and most of the core subjects such as Korean language, Mathematics, Science, English, and Social studies.…”

Maternal Involvement in Education, Bicultural Acceptance, and School Adjustment: An Autoregressive Cross-Lagged Modeling Study among Adolescents from Multicultural Families

“…In South Korea, where societal expectations require mothers to assume primary responsibility for raising children because of persistent gender role stereotypes [29], foreign mothers interact with their children more than fathers and take primary responsibility for providing support for their children's school life and education [15]. In particular, although foreign mothers in multicultural families have the same level of interest in their children's education as mothers from mainstream cultural backgrounds, they are unable to properly guide their children and participate in school education because of their lack of information about the Korean education system and their limited language competencies [30,31]. Foreign mothers in multicultural families have been reported to compensate for their lack of participation in school activities through home-based involvement and private tutoring support [32,33].…”

“…Despite several concerns about the negative impact of private tutoring (e.g., the household economic burden imposed by tutoring fees and the damage students' preference for private tutoring causes to the capacity of public schooling) and some research results showing that the effectiveness of private education is limited [35], private tutoring has emerged as an alternative for supporting the education of children in multicultural families because foreign mothers from these families often lack guidance with regard to their children's education [33]. Previous research findings [28,31] have indicated that higher levels of private tutoring and home-based educational support in multicultural families are consistently associated with higher levels of participation in learning activities and academic achievement among adolescents. Furthermore, prior studies [26,27] have reported that the higher the level of school-based involvement and home-school communication among foreign mothers from multicultural families, the higher the academic achievement and school adjustment of their adolescent children.…”