Despite growing recognition of diverse forms of parental involvement, scarce research exists on the critical influence of sociocultural contexts on parental involvement in their children's education. Building on and modifying Hoover-Dempsey's parental involvement model, this article proposes a new sociocultural model to explain Chinese immigrant…

Examines U.S. and Chinese conceptions of learning with leaning-related terms collected from U.S. and Chinese college students. Cluster analysis yielded a hierarchical structure of this lexicon for each culture. The English terms included elaborated conceptions of mental processes, internal learner characteristics, and social contexts. Most Chinese…

Examined the Chinese model of learning using the Chinese term, "hao-xue-xin" (heart and mind for wanting to learn.) College students described ideal learners. They considered learning a process of moral striving (self-perfection) that stressed seeking knowledge and cultivating passion for lifelong learning, fostering diligence, enduring…

Used prototype methods of cognitive science to collect free associations of learning-related words and phrases from Chinese and American college seniors. Found that both cultures had a large set of conceptions about learning but that there was little overlap between the models of learning. Most striking was the near absence of references to hard…

Two studies were conducted to examine perceptions about achievement and achieving peers in 190 U.S. and Chinese kindergartners. Children provided free-narrative responses to story beginnings about an achieving protagonist in school settings. We found marked cultural differences. For achievement, U.S. children perceived more intellectual…

We present our recent research on children's learning goals and personal agency in the domain of learning in order to show the complexity of selves in Chinese culture. Our research poses challenges to the widely claimed collectivist self-concept in Chinese children and calls for reexamination of selves in specific domains across cultures.…