Family, Ethnicity, and Immigrant Youths’ Educational Achievements

Abstract

Data from the 1988 National Educational Longitudinal Study (NELS) are used to examine immigrant youths’ reading comprehension and mathematics’ standardized scores as well as their parents’ demographic characteristics and parent-child relations that could influence children’s educational achievements. The comparisons were among parents who had emigrated from Asian, Central and South American, or the less often included European countries and their first- and second-generation offspring. It appeared that Asian students did somewhat better than the other groups. However, regardless of ethnicity and also as hypothesized, parents’ aspirations for their children to obtain more education as well as the children’s own aspirations generally were positively related to their children’s doing well in school. Contrary to previous research, though, ethnic background did not consistently differentiate parental help with homework or parent-child conversations about school on the adolescents’ standardized scores.