Elena Makarova

Cultural transition and academic achievement of students from ethnic minority backgrounds: a content analysis of empirical research on acculturation

Background: The achievement gap between immigrant and non-immigrant students that has been identified in most OECD countries and the considerable educational dropout rate among students from ethnic minority backgrounds in some countries have become serious challenges for national educational systems. The educational underachievement of young people from ethnic minority backgrounds is embedded in the process of their acculturation. In the tradition of cross-cultural psychology, acculturation describes individual or ethno-cultural group changes in behaviour and attitudes in the situation of intercultural contact. Such cultural changes are central to the experience of ethnic minority students including newly arriving immigrants, children of immigrants and members of marginalised ethnic and racial groups. Acculturation has been described as a stressful process, and acculturation orientations adopted by young people from ethnic minority backgrounds have been shown to have an impact on their adjustment. Purpose: The school context has been recognised to be the crucial context for acculturation of young people from ethnic minority backgrounds. The academic achievement of these students is thus embedded in the acculturation process, which involves cultural identity development, psychological adjustment and behavioural adjustment. The study is aimed at analysing and systematising the findings of empirical research on acculturation in the school context with a focus on the academic achievement of young people from minority backgrounds. Design and methods: For this study, 29 peer-reviewed articles from a total of 348 articles that matched the search criteria in the database of the Education Resources Information Centre were selected according to inclusion criteria. The selected articles addressed academic achievement of young people from minority backgrounds in relation to at least one of the issues of acculturation such as cultural identity, psychological adjustment and behavioural adjustment. The articles were analysed by applying the method of qualitative content analysis, using MAXQDA software. The findings presented in the selected articles were analysed and integrated according to a deductively developed and inductively enriched category system. Conclusions: Overall, the results of our analysis offer insight into issues of acculturation in relation to academic achievement. Moreover, our findings reveal the complexity of the relationship between cultural transition and school adjustment for young people. As shown in our review, although a bi-cultural orientation was predominantly positively related to school adjustment of minority students, some studies also identified assimilative attitudes as advantageous for students’ academic achievement as well as for their psychological and behavioural adjustment. Moreover, our study has also shown that young people’s acculturative attitudes may have a different impact on their school adjustment relative to acculturative behaviours.

Minority students’ psychological adjustment in the school context: an integrative review of qualitative research on acculturation

The present study aims at systematically analyzing the findings reported in qualitative research on acculturation and psychological adjustment in the school context. Content analysis was conducted using the deductively developed and inductively enriched system of categories. The results of the study provide insights into youths’ acculturation and their psychological adjustment in the school context as well as schools’ mechanisms and strategies for responding to minority youths’ needs in the process of the cultural transition.

Trapped in the gender stereotype? The image of science among secondary school students and teachers

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate the gender stereotype of science by analysing the semantic attributes of gender in relation to three science subjects – chemistry, mathematics, and physics – among students and their science teachers. Design/methodology/approach – This cross-sectional study applied a survey of 3,045 students and 123 teachers in secondary schools. The gendered image of science was assessed using a semantic differential consisting of 25 pairs of adjectives with semantically opposite meanings. Findings – In summary, the results of the study demonstrate that from the female students’ perspective mathematics and physics are negatively related to female gender, whereas chemistry is neither significantly related to the male nor to the female profile. From the male students’ point of view mathematics is negatively related to the female gender, whereas chemistry and physics are positively related to the male gender. In the science teachers’ perception chemistry and physics comb...

Hidden school dropout among immigrant students: a cross-sectional study

Actual school dropout among immigrant youth has been addressed in a number of studies, but research on hidden school dropout among immigrant students is rare. Thus, the objective of this paper is to analyze hidden school dropout among primary school students with an immigrant background. The analyses were performed using survey data of 1186 immigrant students in Swiss primary schools. Our results show that immigrant students’ academic achievement, their attitudes towards school-related values, and the quality of their relationships with classmates and teachers were significant predictors of their disengagement during classes. Moreover, our findings strongly suggest that those predictors that are important for actual school dropout are crucial for hidden school dropout as well. We conclude that low-achieving immigrant youth who do not value school and who have poor relationships with teachers and peers are especially at risk of hidden and, eventually, of actual school dropout.

Gender Roles Within the Family: A Study Across Three Language Regions of Switzerland

The present study focuses on gender roles and attitudes towards gender roles within the family among young adults in Switzerland. The study is based on a quantitative survey of 928 university students in the German-, French-, and Italian-speaking parts of Switzerland. The gender roles of mothers and fathers are conceptualized along three dimensions: household, childcare, and paid employment. The results concerning gender roles in the heritage family of our respondents are in line with findings of previous studies and show that the young adults in our sample grew up in families with unequal gender roles, where mothers were responsible for the household and childcare and fathers were the breadwinners. The mothers’ contribution to the household and their involvement in childcare and in paid employment differ significantly across the three main parts of Switzerland. Concerning prospective views on the gender roles in their future family, the young adults in our sample indicated a tendency towards egalitarian attitudes. However, mothers’ contribution to household labor and childcare was projected to be higher than that of fathers; at the same time fathers were foreseen as making a larger contribution to the family income than mothers in the prospective family. Moreover, attitudes towards gender roles in their future family differed significantly across the three major parts of Switzerland and were related to the differences in gender roles they experienced in their heritage family.

Disziplinäre und theoretische Zugänge

Wurde aus sprachpragmatischer Sicht interkulturelle Kommunikation zunachst allgemein als »Interaktion von Personen unterschiedlicher Zunge« verstanden (Rehbein 1985a), wurde diese Auffassung spater zu der These spezifiziert, »interkulturelle Kommunikation sei kulturelles Handeln in mehrsprachigen Konstellationen« (Redder/Rehbein 1987; Rehbein 2006). Der Weg zwischen diesen Definitionen ist bis heute durch einen intensiven Forschungsprozess gekennzeichnet, auf den hier nur exemplarisch eingegangen werden kann. Eine starke Motivation zur Thematisierung interkultureller Kommunikation auch in der Linguistik durfte nicht zuletzt die Kritik an der weitgehend noch lebendigen Mentalitat gewesen sein, die zur nationalsozialistischen Vernichtung der Juden, Sinti und Roma sowie allgemein unter Angabe rassistischer und volkischer ›Konzepte‹ zur Unterdruckung von Minderheiten gefuhrt hat und fuhrt (vgl. z. B. Grunberg/Straub 2001).