Dr. Su Yeong Kim Explores How Acculturation Gaps Shape the Academic Journeys of Chinese American Youth

The immigrant family has to engage in navigating the new cultural lifestyle, even while trying to hold onto or maintain the previous cultural lifestyle. Chinese American adolescents often find themselves in those middle ground roles, involved in interpretative behaviors that help bridge their family connections across time, and achieve academically.

In a longitudinal study of 444 Chinese American families, we investigated how acculturation, specifically the alignment/dissonance among parent's cultural profiles to adolescents' cultural profiles, predicted changes in academic performance from the 8th grade through the 12th grade.

Beyond Language: Mapping Cultural Orientation Profiles

Instead of using broad categorization terms such as "first-generation" or merely measuring language proficiency, our team adopted a person-centered framework, examining multiple indicators of cultural heritage values, language abilities, and sense of familial obligation.

We identified three acculturation profiles:


  • Chinese Oriented: High engagement with the heritage culture, and lower alignment with mainstream American values.

  • American Oriented: Stronger identification with American norms and language.

  • Bicultural: High engagement with both the heritage culture and mainstream culture.


Each family member, mothers, fathers, adolescents, were classified in one of the three profiles above. We looked how their individual orientations and collective orientations impacted academic outcomes which include GPA, ELA and Math standardized tests.

What We Discovered: Trends in Academic Paths ?

Our analysis has illustrated that acculturation is not the same predictor consistently. Instead, its effect depends on whether we are examining GPA, English, or Math scores.

  • GPA: The Father Factor - Adolescents whose fathers were oriented within their Chinese heritage culture had significantly lower GPAs across their four years of high school, even after controlling for other factors including income and parental education. This suggests that without a certain involvement in the mainstream education system, the father's connection to a highly salient heritage culture unintentionally created barriers of support for academic engagement.

  • English Language Arts: Cultural Fit Matters- Adolescents who were more Chinese-oriented than their parents, a non-normative pattern, consistently had the lowest standardized ELA scores. In contrast, teens who were more American-oriented than their parents, a more normative pattern, had the highest ELA scores. The results suggest that it is not just whether an adolescent is culturally aligned; it matters if their cultural orientation fit (or clashes) with their parents.

  • Math: American Orientation May Have Limits- Interestingly, adolescents with American-oriented parents (especially mothers) were lower in Math. This may speak to a potential erosion of cultural strengths tied to aspects of heritage practices, such as the traditional Chinese emphasis on mathematics and structured discipline, that allowed such students to achieve at a high level.

Why is this Research Important ?

This research has implications for our understanding of the "acculturation gap", a muted cultural disjuncture between immigrant parents and their children. The findings present several implications for educators, school counselors, and family support programs:

  • Recognize that biculturalism is an asset: Adolescents and families who move fluidly between American and Chinese cultures are more continuously successful across academic domains

  • Promote bicultural identity formation: Schools and community initiatives should promote spaces that encourage dual cultural identities rather than the binary between cultures

  • Recognize the family social ecology as a predictor: Programs designed to promote achievement among students should pay attention to the cultural orientations of parents and adolescents, and how well they align

Deconstructing the "Model Minority" Narrative

While some Chinese American students are often seen as high-achieving students, our findings highlight remarkable variability for individuals in this demographic. Coping with two cultures, the emotional labor of interacting with cultural dissonance at home, can be too much to manage for some adolescents.

Academic achievement is more than what students know; it is also who they are culturally, and how that aligns with their family identity.


Published in : National Library of Medicine

Read the full research article on https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4231017/

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