Degree Expectations of Senior High School Students in Macau by Country of Origin
Ramsey Koo(Centre for Educational Research University of Macau)
This study was intended to examine the effects of country of origin and sex on Chinese students' expectations about their educational attainment at univer-sity. Respondents in this study were 294 secondary school Chinese students, all attending the fifth and sixth forms in the Spring term of 1993, at six large, private independent secondary schools in Macau. Findings revealed that about half of the students intended to further their education by completing only a bachelor's degree. For postgraduate education, 17 percent of all the respond-ents would like to obtain a master's degree, while 12 percent expected to pur-sue a doctorate (PhD). Sex difference on degree expectation was not signifi-cant, although females tended to be more indefinite than males in their pur-suit of university education. As to the influence of country of origin on expec-tation, Macau-born Chinese students demonstrated a higher level of educa-tional expectation than those students who were born in mainland China. Fur-thermore, results derived from multi-variate analysis with cross-tabulation employed to determine the influence of place of birth on degree expectation, while controlling the effects of length of residence in Macau, failed to reveal much relationship for all four levels of the control variable (RESIDEM). In addition, the hypothesis that Macau-born rather than China-born students have higher educational expectation is substantiated. However this observed relationship became spurious when length of residence in Macau was held constant.
Introduction
Why does a senior secondary school leaver expect to complete no more than an undergraduate education as opposed to continuing to attain a postgraduate educa-tion? The answer to this question is no doubt a very complex one. Family background, sex, age, socio-economic status, self-concept, motivation, country of origin, accul-turation, length of residence in the host country, job opportunities, and many other variables could affect one's level of educational expectation. The present research focuses upon some selected demographic and socio-cultural variables influencing degree expectation among Chinese students of various geographic backgrounds andsub-cultural origins.
Traditionally, educational and social researchers, school teachers, district administrators, college counsellors, and admission personnel have been con-cerned with social and cultural factors that might influence students' scholas-tic accomplishments. In past studies of the academic success of minority and immigrant students, a number of socio-cultural variables have been found to associate with academic achievement. Baldauf and Ayabe attempted to link educational achievement to overt (external) and covert (internal) measures of acculturation for 190 senior high school students in their final year of second-ary education in American Samoa.1 Findings of the study revealed that adap-tation to both the overt and covert elements of the Anglo host culture is cru-cial for students of sub-cultural backgrounds to succeed in American schools.
An investigation was conducted by Koo to ascertain the relationships among a selected group of demographic, academic and non-academic vari-ables on the scholastic success of Chinese college students from various socio-cultural origins in California.2 He found that the academic grades of Chinese students correlated significantly with their college major (p < 0.05), high school grades (p < 0.01), length of residence in the United States (p <0.001), and Eng-lish language skills (p < 0.05). Other variables such as sex, age, country of origin, acculturation, participation in extracurricular activities, financial aid and enrolment status did not reveal much correlation with the success crite-rion of cumulative college grade-point averages. Sex differences on achieve-ment did exist, nonetheless, with female students superior to males in aca-demic grades. Moreover, when all the Chinese subjects were classified accord-ing to country of origin, students from Taiwan were found to have the most academic difficulties. That is, their cumulative grade-point average was mark-edly lower than that of students from the People's Republic of China. The dif-ferences in academic grades among Hong Kong, mainland China and Ameri-can-born Chinese students were not found to be statistically significant, how-ever.
Degree expectation is so crucial in the school setting that many educators believe high academic achievement expectations from self and parents form an important condition for students' future success. For example, in a recent survey of 894 Chinese secondary-school students in Hong Kong, Cheng and Wong explored the relationships between style of learning mathematics and mathematics achievement, parents' education, size of residence, and expecta-tion from parents and self.3 Findings of this study revealed little relationship between learning style and parents' education and size of residence. Also, the relationship between degree expectation and learning style is significant mainly in the category concerning homework, and in some other areas such as how routinely a student uses his calculator and his expectation of diagrams in the textbook.4
While considerable research linking academic success with expectation has been conducted at various levels of education,5 none of these studies is found to be relevant to Chinese students in Macau. The present study is in-tended to provide some empirical evidence for understanding the academicachievement expectations of Chinese students in Macau by examining the pos-sible relationships of sex, country of origin, and length of residence on degree expectations.
Research Questions
This study will attempt to answer one central and specific question: do Macau-born Chinese students differ from foreign-born Chinese students in terms of edu-cational expectation? Because of the explicit connection between socio-cultural adaptation and academic aspiration,6 as well as many other inherited economic and political advantages possessed by the dominant group in the Macau mainstream so-ciety, one may hypothesize that native students exhibit a significantly higher level of educational expectation than students born outside the host territory.7
In addition to the central question, this study also gathered information per-taining to the following research questions:
1) Are there significant differences in academic achievement expectations according to Chinese students' sex or gender?
2) Are there significant differences in academic achievement expectations between native Chinese students and those who originated in (a) main-land China, (b) Hong Kong, and (c) other countries?
3) What is the impact of length of residence on the relationship of country of origin and degree expectation?
Data and Method
The participants in this study consisted of 294 seniors from six large (en-rolment over 1,000) private secondary schools in Macau. All students were enrolled in the fifth and sixth forms in the spring term of 1993. In addition to local recognition, all these schools receive subsidies from the Education De-partment and offer standard curriculum and routine programmes to local stu-dents. A questionnaire was designed to obtain the necessary demographic and academic data from students, such as sex, place of birth, length of residence in Macau, degree expectations and some other relevant background informa-tion. Data derived from the 294 respondents were then analysed by the SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences) program. Cross-tabulation, chi-square tests, one-way ANOVA, Tukey's multiple comparison and post-hoc pro-cedures were employed to ascertain the effects of the independent variables on the dependent variable of students' degree expectations.
Findings
Table 1 shows the distribution of students in different schools with respect to form level. Some important demographic characteristics of the respondents (N=294) are listed in Table 2. Further results are summarised in various tables and pre-sented in order of the level of complexity in analysing variables:
Degree Expectation by Sex
A cross-tabulation of degree expectation by sex is presented in Table 3. It is important to point out that while nearly half of all male (52 percent) as well as
female students (48 percent) intended to continue their education by completing a bachelor's degree, more women (18.6 per cent) rather than men (16.5 percent) hoped to go on to a master's degree. Few students, particularly women, intended to continue for a doctorate, as indicated by the figures ? only one-tenth of the female sample compared with three twentieths of the male sample. This gradual dimin-ishing or slow weeding out of women in postgraduate studies may result in a narrowing pipeline for women in the academic field. In addition, women tended to be more indefinite in their pursuit of higher education; over 20 percent of the female sample were not certain as to whether they would enter university upon completion of the senior high school diploma.
For the first research question, the relationship between sex and degree expecta-tion was determined by the chi-square test. Results of the chi-square procedure are shown in Table 4. Since the calculated value of 3.34 was not significant at the 0.05 level, it is evident that sex has no significant relationship with deeree choice.
Table 5 shows the means and standard deviations of male and female degree expectation scores. Results of the Analysis of Variance (ANOVA), as presented in Table 5, indicate that although the mean expectation of females (
=3.04) exceededthat of males (
=2.87); the computed F-ratio of 1.312 in Table 6 was far too small to be significant at the 0.05 level. On the basis of the above findings, we may con-clude that there is no fundamental difference in degree expectations between male and female Chinese students.
Degree Expectation by Country of Origin
Table 7 is a crosstabulation of degree expectation by birth status (native vs foreign). It is important to point out that, on the whole, Macau students were rather highly motivated individuals. As the figures indicate, only 1.7 percent of the total did not expect to pursue education beyond secondary school, and approximately 19 percent could not decide their desired level of degree attainment.
The breakdown of the total sample by birth status indicates that, compared with the foreign-born students (12.8 percent), a higher proportion of students in the Macau-born sample (24.2 percent) were not quite certain about their degree choice and that native students were also less likely to continue their education upon completion of the sixth form in secondary school (2.6 percent).
University degrees appear to be important to both native and foreign-born students. It is interesting to note that over 86 percent of foreign-born subjects ex-pressed their degree expectations for some type of university degrees in contrast to the lower 73 percent in the Macau sample. In fact, 60 percent of the non-native students preferred to obtain a bachelor's degree, as against 40 percent of the do-mestic students. The above pattern seemed to reverse itself at the postgraduate level, with more students in the Macau group (21 percent) being attracted by a master's degree. Finally, the percentage of students with expectations of achiev-ing the PhD degree was rather low, about 12 percent in both the domestic and foreign samples.
The relationship between place of birth and degree expectation was deter-mined by using the chi-square test with four degrees of freedom. Results of this analysis are summarised in Table 8. Since the calculated value of 14.72 at the ob-served level was significant at the 0.05 level, we may conclude that students' birth status (native vs foreign) is not independent of their level of academic achieve-ment expectation.
As to the central research question, the difference in degree expectation be-tween domestic and foreign-born students was determined by the statistical pro-cedures of the one-way Analysis of Variance (ANOVA). Figures in Table 9 reveal that the group mean for students born in Macau was 3.16, and for foreign-born was 2.76. The mean score of the foreign sample was 0.39 points lower than that of the domestic sample. Since the above means were statistically different at the 0.05 level, it may be concluded that Macau-born students have higher degree expecta-tions than foreign-born students (see Table 10).
In response to the second research question, students in the total sample were divided into four country-of-origin categories -- i.e., Macau, mainland China (PRC), Hong Kong and Other. An ANOVA was employed to analyse the difference between group means on degree expectations for each of the four classifications. As may be seen in Table 11, the Macau sample had a higher mean (3.16), followed by 'Other' (3.00), and Hong Kong (2.95). Compared with other means, 2.71 for PRC students was somewhat lower; the distribution of scores in this group was the most consistent (SD=1.07). Table 12 is a summary of the ANOVA of degree expectations by country of origin. The results of this analysis generated a signifi-cant F-ratio at the 0.05 level (df = 3, 293); hence the differences in degree expecta-tions between various Chinese samples were confirmed. In the next step, a post-hoc multiple comparison technique with the Tukey-B procedure was employed to
follow up how these means differ from one another. Table 13 is a summary of that post-hoc comparison. Results of the multiple comparison procedures revealed only one case of pair difference at the 0.05 level - that is, the mean of 2.71 of the main-land China-born sample was markedly lower than that of the Macau-born sample. The differences in degree expectations between students originating in Mainland China, Hong Kong and Other failed to reach the same level of statistical significance.
Degree Expectation by Length of Residence
To understand whether or not the differences in educational expectation we have observed in place of birth (native vs foreign) and country of origin were due to the influence of length of residence in the host city (of Macau), a multiple cross-tabulation procedure -- i.e. SELFEXP BY BIRTH STATUS and SELFEXP BY COUN-TRY OF ORIGIN -- comprising four partial tables of the main relationship for
each level of the control variable, length of residence in Macau (1 = Below 5 years, 2 = 5 to 10, 3 = 10 to 15, 4 = over 15 years), was undertaken. Table 14 gives the results of the multivariate analysis with cross-tabulation used to determine the influence of place of birth (native vs foreign) on degree expectation, controlling for the effect of residence in Macau (RESIDEM). The figures in this table reveal that for length of residence below 5 years the computed chi-square value of 0.73 was far too small to be significant at the 0.05 level. Similar results are also noted for level 2 "between 5 and 10 years," level 3 "between 10 and 15 years" and level 4 "over 15 years."
Table 15 illustrates the results of the second cross-tabulation with place of origin divided into the four types: Macau, mainland China, Hong Kong, and Other. The figures indicate that the computed chi-square values across all four levels of the control variable (i.e., length of residence in Macau) were not significant at the 0.05 level. In light of the above findings, it is evident that country of origin has no bearing on academic achievement expectation when length of residence is heldconstant.
Conclusions and Implications
The findings of the present investigation indicate that there is no marked dif-ference in educational expectation between male and female Chinese students who were enrolled in the six schools selected for study. On the other hand, a statisti-cally significant relationship was found to exist between place of birth and educa-tional expectation.
Specifically, Macau-born students had expectations of higher educational at-tainment than their mainland-born counterparts. The hypothesis that native-born students have higher aspirations in education than foreign-born students is thus supported. When length of residence in Macau was held constant, the observed relationship between degree expectation and country of origin became spurious.
The question of why foreign-born Chinese students have lower aspirations towards education has not been fully answered in this research. Undoubtedly, there are many other important variables related to degree expectations, such as learn-ing style, motivation, socio-economic status, assimilation, and peer and family influence, which are well beyond the scope of the present investigation. Never-theless, despite these possibilities, the findings of this study have confirmed one important parallel conclusion drawn previously by Koo; that is, overseas Chinese students born in the host country had higher education expectations than non-local-born students. Furthermore, while students' academic achievement expec-tations could have been influenced by their country of origin, such relationships seemed to disappear when length of residence was controlled. Thus, the present research has indicated that length of residence is a main cause for the academic advancement. It is understood that in schools students have expectations for each other and for themselves, and yet degree expectation is a highly complex social, cultural and psychological process in which students in their secondary schoolyears are not completely self-aware--capable of inquiring and reflecting about themselves-- and will continue to develop or emerge differentially in the process of socio-cultural adaptation and self-actualization. On the other hand, it may also be the fact that educational expectation beyond the secondary level is an actual reflection of the strong aspiration among many Chinese parents who are eager to assume responsibility for the future educational success of their children.8
Finally, the present study provides only a hint of the vast complexity in the relations among country of origin, sex and degree expectation. There is a strong need for further research on different levels of secondary and higher education as well as future replication efforts in order to more clearly refine our current under-standing of the degree expectation process among Chinese students from various ethno-cultural and geographic regions, including countries with a vast diversity of Chinese population, such as Taiwan, Singapore, Vietnam, Thailand, Canada and the United States.
Notes
1 R. B. Baldauf and H. I. Ayabe, "Acculturation and Educational Achievement in American Samoan Adolescents," Journal of Cross-cultural Psychology, 8 (1977): 246-255.
2 R. Koo,"Prediction of Academic Achievement among Chinese Students from Diverse Socio-cultural Backgrounds," (Ed. D. dissertation, University of San Fran-cisco, 1986).
3 S. C. Cheng and N. Y. Wong, "Mathematics Achievement, Parents' School-ing, Residential Size and Expectation from Parents and Self," Education Research Journal, 6 (1991): 86-92.
4 S. C. Cheng and N. Y. Wong, "The Attitude towards Learning Mathematics among Secondary School Students in Hong Kong," Education Journal, 19, no. 1 (1991): 13-18.
5 F. J. Boersma and J. W. Chapman, "Teachers' and Mothers' Academic Achievement Expectations for Learning Disabled Children," Journal of School Psy-chology, 20 (1982): 216-221.
6 I. R. Cordova, "The Relationship of Acculturation, Achievement, and Al-ienation among Spanish American Sixth Grade Students," (Ph.D. dissertation, Univesity of New Mexico, 1969).
7 Y. Y. Chan, Current Perspectives on Macau Development (Hong Kong: Wide Angle Press Ltd, 1993).
8 P. E. Griffin and M. C. Mok, "Student Gender, Home Support and Achieve-ment in Mathematics among Hong Kong Secondary Students," Educational Research Journal, 5 (1990): 43-50.
References
Yuan, D. Y. 1988. "Changes in Traditional Employment Patterns of the Chi-nese in the United States: A Case Study of Immigrants from Macau, 1960-80." Jour-nal of Macau Studies, 1: 55-64. (Published by the Centre of Macau Studies, Univer-sity of East Asia, Macau).
