Su-Yen Chen

Extracurricular Reading Habits of College Students in Taiwan: Findings From Two National Surveys

The Chinese people have great regard for those who read widely, yet little is known of the extracurricular reading behaviors of Chinese students. This study drew on data from two national surveys to investigate the amount of time Taiwanese college students spend on extracurricular reading. Findings are interpreted in relation to prior research on the reading habits of college students internationally. The study found that • Female students on average did not spend more time on extracurricular reading than males • Students from public institutions, who generally have higher academic competence, did not spend more time reading than students from private institutions • Education majors spent the least time on extracurricular reading • Newspapers, magazines, and bestsellers were the most popular reading materials, but manga (graphic novels) had medium popularity • Crosscultural differences might have an impact on the amount of time spent reading and on reading interests

Differentiating Personal Facilitators of Leisure Participation: Socio-demographics, Personality Traits, and the Need for Sociability

This paper first compares the extent to which socio-demographics, personality traits, and the need for sociability each facilitates different kinds of leisure participation with the general population in Taiwan. It then distinguishes how some of these factors differ in facilitating leisure for men and women. By means of hierarchical regression analyses of data from the Taiwan Social Change Survey (n=2,144), we found that the participation in solitary leisure activities, including music listening and book reading, was overwhelmingly determined by socio-demographic factors, particularly age and education. In contrast, both personality traits and the need for sociability help explain who are engaged more often in mostly-social leisure such as gathering with friends and doing physical activities. Such intrapersonal and interpersonal forces also accounted for a larger proportion of the total explained variance. Although most measures of an individuals background were significant in differentiating who participated more in both solitary and mostly-social leisure, the activities differed markedly in the size effects of these measures. Furthermore, some of these personal measures facilitated leisure participation consistently, whereas others exerted somewhat contradictory or inconsistent effects, particularly within male and female subpopulations.

Developing a Chinese version of an Author Recognition Test for college students in Taiwan

This study set out to develop a Chinese Author Recognition Test (CART) that might be used as a measure of objective print exposure for college students in Taiwan. We found that there is a linkage between print exposure and general reading achievement for college students. We also found that, among self-reported reading habits, comparative reading habits and CART, primary print knowledge scores within the CART family have the strongest prediction power for both the ‘General Scholastic Ability Test-Chinese’ and the ‘Department Required Test-Chinese’ beyond the joint contributions of vocabulary size and reading comprehension. By sharing the process of developing the instrument, we shed some light for researchers from regions other than English-speaking countries on how they might move forward in future investigations.

The Role of Achievement Motivations and Achievement Goals in Taiwanese College Students' Cognitive and Psychological Outcomes.

This study explores how motivational factors are associated with Taiwanese college students’ cognitive, personal, and social development by incorporating both relatively global, static self-attributes, such as social-oriented achievement motivation and individual-oriented achievement motivation, which are considered to be culturally balanced conceptions of achievement motivation for Chinese people, and more domain-specific self-attributes, such as achievement goals, which are widely adopted internationally. The findings suggest that institutions can encourage students to set their own motivational goals, rather than adopting goals set by the family or the clan, and to focus on self-referenced competence development and personal improvement.