Kao, Grace, and Marta Tienda. “Optimism and Achievement: The Educational Performance of Immigrant Youth .” Social Science Quarterly. no. 1 (1995). http://0-web.a.ebscohost.com.books.redlands.edu/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?sid=47797f1f-2597-4932-8916-fe5aa80aeeeb@sessionmgr4005&vid=1&hid=4204 (accessed February 1, 2014).

This article can also be found in the Armacost Library.

“Optimism and Achievement: The Educational Performance of Immigrant Youth” by Grace Kao and Marta Tienda looks at whether assimilation benefits immigrant students. It looks at “the relative merits of three hypotheses regarding generational status and scholastic performance: (1) straight-line assimilation; (2) accommodation without assimilation; (3) immigrant optimism,” as explained in the abstract. The article first looks at hypotheses one and two by comparing data on educational achievements and moves to compare these findings further with data on parental attitudes and behaviors. The topic of this article is the educational performance of immigrant youth and poses the question: does assimilation benefit the educational achievement of immigrant youth?

This question can be answered with a few different types of data. Educational achievement should most-likely be measured with quantitative data such as test scores, grades, or graduation rates. In this case, the study uses test scores, grades, and college aspirations of eighth graders. In this study, the authors used The National Educational Longitudinal Study of 1988, a national survey with a two-stage  probability sampling design, providing a nationally representative sample of 24,599 students from 1,052 randomly selected schools. The authors looked at a statistical profile of students. For grades, they simply compared the grades of students with first generation, second generation, and third generation immigrant status and native-born status. In addition, they performed a regression analysis on middle-school grades, eighth grade math and reading test scores, and aspirations to graduate from college. To analyze parental attitudes and behaviors, they performed a statistical analysis on family rules and communication among first generation immigrant parents, second generation immigrant parents, and native generation parents and looked at the relationship between these data and educational achievement.

This research was very thorough and provided statistical analysis which provided results that were easy to organize and present in their write-up. Although some members of the general public may struggle to interpret statistical analyses, they don’t need to be able to do so to understand the findings because the authors explain the results with great detail. The research was ethical, informative, and designed to be unbiased. The only difficulty I had was an unclear definition of “college aspirations.” I’m assuming the data on college aspirations were collected in a way that made them quantifiable because a statistical analysis was performed on the data, however it is not clear what they mean in the results by “higher college aspirations” among certain groups.

Interestingly, other variables appeared to have an impact on the results: race and ethnic background. The authors did take the time to address these variables in their results. This research wielded favorable results for accommodation without assimilation and immigrant optimism and did not favor straight-line assimilation. It is interesting to see two out of three of their hypotheses were favored by the data and one was not because we often think of hypotheses of mutually exclusive. The two different types of data were helpful in strengthening the results of the study, and looking at the relationship between the two offered a detailed analysis.