The Psychology of Asian Learners

The Psychology of Asian Learners Ronnel B. King • Allan B. I. Bernardo Editors The Psychology of Asian Learners A Festschrift in Honor of David Watkins Editors Ronnel B. King Allan B. I. Bernardo Department of Curriculum and Instruction Faculty of Social Sciences, Department The Hong Kong Institute of Education of Psychology Hong Kong SAR , P.R. China University of Macau Macau SAR , P.R. China ISBN 978-981-287-575-4 ISBN 978-981-287-576-1 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-981-287-576-1 Library of Congress Control Number: 2015951819 Springer Singapore Heidelberg New York Dordrecht London © Springer Science+Business Media Singapore 2016 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifi cally the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfi lms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specifi c statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. Printed on acid-free paper Springer Science+Business Media Singapore Pte Ltd. is part of Springer Science+Business Media (www.springer.com) Foreword This is a book recognising one of the major contributors to educational psychology in Asia. It outlines the seeming paradox about Asian learners who perform so well in international tests of school achievement and collaborative learning – but many in the West shudder at what they see are didactic, top-down teaching methods and an over reliance on memorisation, rote learning, and surface-level thinking. Simple answers to this paradox are often provided, such as the East is collectivist, whereas the West is individualist; the East overuses memory, whereas the West uses deeper learning; the East favours effort, whereas the West favours ability; and so on. This book dispels these false contrasts and offers a much more nuanced interpretation about the qualities of the Asian learner. Another aim of this book is to celebrate the scholarly achievements of Professor David Watkins who has pioneered research on the Asian learner. His four earlier books with John Biggs (and others) – The Chinese Learner: Cultural, Psychological, and Contextual Infl uences (1996), Teaching the Chinese Learner: Psychological and Pedagogical Perspectives (2001), Learning and Teaching in Hong Kong: What Is and What Might Be (1993), and Learning and Development of Asian Students: What the 21st Century Teacher Needs to Think About (2010) – were among the fi rst to create a research literature on the Chinese learner and created a platform for many others to research this topic. The chapters in this book show the generative power and solid platform that David and John provided, and the fascination is how their ideas have spread from China to encompass many other Asian countries. Kember’s chapter in this book provides the story of this development and how the paradox has been resolved, while McInerney’s chapter tells the story of David’s solid research programme and how it has evolved throughout the years. In each chapter David’s work is evident, and what a powerful contribution he has made. I fi rst met David when we were young lecturers at the University of New England. He was in the Higher Education unit, had a fascination with chess, was a fellow lover of quantitative methods (David’s fi rst degree was in mathematical sta- tistics), and had a deep knowledge of the research literature. I learned that I had to hurry up and read the literature he kept sending me as most morning tea times were punctuated with “what did you think of the x article”, “how come x said this but y v vi Foreword said that”, and his pursuit of the big ideas. This was the start of a long friendship spanning 35 years. David left New England to move to ANU in Canberra, then to my home province Canterbury in New Zealand, and then to Hong Kong where his major substantive work that is the focus of this book was undertaken. His research is built on educational psychology and measurement, and we have kept researching together; we have shared supervision and involvement in our student’s theses and co-authored 35+ papers. I visited Hong Kong on many occasions and was wonderfully hosted by David and Oletia; we have followed our respective families from children into adulthood, and we share our love of cricket and the All Blacks. Our work crosses David’s major interests: self-esteem, student learning strategies, conceptions of teaching and learning, and cross-cultural methods. As exam- ples of our joint interests, we have published together on self-esteem : self-concept clarity, the relationship between self-concept scales and social disability, and the structure of self-esteem in Nepalese children. On conceptions : competing causal models linking academic goals and learning strategies, multiple goals in a Hong Kong Chinese educational context, academic risk factors and learned hopelessness, late change in the medium of instruction, the motive-strategy congruence model, approaches to learning of Australian secondary school students, and preferred class- room environment and approaches to learning. On cross-cultural : how concepts of competition differ across cultures, interactions between collectivist and individualist attributes, and measuring collectivism and individualism. My favourite collabo- ration was a paper that has been lost in the uncited undergrowth of history (Watkins & Hattie, 1985). We followed a group of students through their undergraduate years and were the fi rst to apply the invariant factor model (McDonald, 1984) to these change data. It was fascinating to see that surface not deep learners were more likely to succeed at undergraduate primarily because surface learning was more favoured in the examinations despite college lecturers repeatedly telling the students that they preferred deep learning. Students who were strategic were the most successful. The paper combined our joint interests in conceptions of learning and statistical methodology and was one of the most enjoyable papers I have worked on. David’s books speak to the foundations he has provided for this book: The Chinese Learner, Learning and Teaching in Hong Kong , Teaching the Chinese Learner , and Learning and Development of Asian Students . His 200+ research papers provide a depth of detail about these major topics of his research, and it is only deteriorating eyesight that is slowing him down – even though we all look forward to his next impact – which for me is David saying “John, do you really have evidence for that?” “Are you sure?” Away we would go and redo the analyses, pour over the interpretation, get excited when it related to previous fi ndings, and get really excited when it did not so relate. These reminders to “tell the story” based on the evidence will remain, and all my own students know the phrase “what is the story” as I probably ask it every meeting. There are powerful stories in this book. Most academics pride themselves on what they leave behind – and there is no better heritage than your PhD students. David has supervised a total of 36 research postgraduate students, and many of them are authors in this book. They have gone Foreword vii on to publish and to take leading research positions throughout Asia, and they have honoured their mentor with this festschrift. John Hattie References Biggs, J. B., & Watkins, D. A. (Eds.) (1993). Learning and teaching in Hong Kong: What is and what might be. Hong Kong: Faculty of Education, The University of Hong Kong. McDonald, R. P. (1984). The invariant factor model for multimode data. In H. G. Law, C. W. Snyder, J. A. Hattie & R. P. McDonald (Eds.), Research methods of multimode data analysis (pp. 285–307). New York: Praeger Scientifi c. Watkins, D. A., & Biggs, J. B. (Eds.) (1996). The Chinese learner: Cultural, psychological, and contextual infl uences (edited with John Biggs). Melboune, Australia/Hong Kong: Australian Council for Educational Research/Hong Kong Comparative Education Research Centre. Watkins, D. A., & Biggs, J. B. (Eds.) (2001). Teaching the Chinese Learner: Psychological and Pedagogical Perspectives (edited with John Biggs). Australia/Hong Kong: Australian Council for Educational Research/Hong Kong Comparative Education Research Centre. Watkins, D. & Hattie, J.A. (1985). A longitudinal study of the approaches to learning of Australian Tertiary students. Human Learning , 4 , 127–141. Zhang, L. F., Biggs, J., & Watkins, D. A. (Eds.) (2010). Learning and development of Asian students: What the 21st century teacher needs to think about . Singapore: Pearson. Contents Part I Introduction 1 Advancing Psychological Studies on Asian Learners: Honoring the Legacy of David A. Watkins.......................... 3 Ronnel B. King and Allan B. I. Bernardo 2 A Journey Through David Watkins’s Research and Contribution to Cross-Cultural Psychology .................................. 15 Dennis M. McInerney Part II Beliefs About Learning and Schooling 3 The Indispensable Role of Culture in Shaping Children’s Learning Beliefs ................................................................... 37 Jin Li 4 Understanding Students’ Beliefs About Knowledge and Learning in a Sociocultural Context: The Case of Korean Middle School Students ........................................................ 53 Jungsoon Choi 5 Youths’ Reasoning About Higher Education in Macao ......................

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