Do American students typically lag behind students from certain other countries (think Finland, Japan, Israel, South Korea, etc.) in terms of motivation, desire to succeed academically, or willingness to push themselves diligently, and to what extent does this affect academic performance?
If there *is *a “motivation gap,” it doesn’t seem to be addressed much in education circles.
Anecdotally, I’ve found that students who were refugees or first-generation immigrants to the USA from abroad are at times significantly more diligent, academically, than American-born students who had an Americanized attitude or upbringing.
I can only comment about indirect information between the Netherlands and the US. According to academics who taught in both places, US students (in decent schools) start out with quite a deficit in knowledge and general “level”… but by the end of the “bachelor phase” they typically have caught up and are at a similar level. This basically means they achieve more in college then their Dutch compatriots.
I’m quite sure there are dopers who have more direct experiences to share.
Yes, there is a motivation gap, but I wouldn’t attribute it directly to the students.
It also suggests that they have achieved less in high school than their Dutch comparators.
Or, to take a slightly longer view, they have achieved pretty much the same things in formal education, but by slightly different routes or by taking various aspects of their education in a different order.
In before someone blames minorities.
Is it any surprise that a self-selecting population–folks who are willing to risk everything in their lives to move to a country where they don’t speak the language or know hardly anyone–would tend to be more driven than the population at large, or to rear children with a greater sense of motivation than the population at large? An apples-to-apples comparison wouldn’t be immigrant kids to non-immigrant kids, but rather the kids of immigrants from a certain country to the kids whose parents didn’t emigrate from that same country.
I don’t like to generalize, as every education system has its problems. But I do think American students are somewhat removed from the sense raw competition that some other countries have.
My Chinese college students were very aware, every second of their academic lives, that there are a billion Chinese people and only some of them are going to have a shot at a decent life. And among those, they are all competing with a billion Indians, a billion Africans, and a few billion other folks, many of whom have access to vastly better resources.
The intensity isn’t exactly good- it leads to some pretty negative stuff. But it does worry me that we see global competition here being motivation for resentment and protectionism, rather than motivation to really get on our game. I have some college age relatives, and they seem pretty clueless to how hard they are going to have to fight for jobs.
I agree wholeheartedly. I would add that the attitudes of American students is somewhat understandable given the economic and technological center of gravity is still in the West, and largely concentrated in their backyard (the US). I think attitudes will begin to change when you see Americans wanting or needing to move abroad for economic opportunity, and/or education.
Furthermore, our best students are still among the best in the world, so I don’t think it’s an indictment of the American education system as a whole.
Our sister taught both in the US and our country (The Philippines.) A lot of teaching policies in US schools are “student-driven” as she puts it. She prefers the Philippines in that respect. But on the other hand, she says US schools are certainly not lacking in diligent, conscientious students (whether or not they’re Harvard material.)
Just my own observation, American parents (the ones I see) are a lot stricter when it comes to disciplining their kids, especially in public. Filipinos see anyone younger than 12 to be a loose cannon that should be on a leash or best left secured at home. And finding fault in their actions is like trying to convict a rock.
Well the average student I would venture is same the world over as far as motivation is concerned. Just do the minimum necessary to ensure that parents/guardians and teachers remain off their backs.
I have met quite a few Chinese students. Did not see them as more or less motivated.
By students I mean those under 16. After 16 then yes motivations can vary.
To the mix, I’ll add gender. My anecdotal experience as a teacher of undergrads is that female students overall are much more “motivated” and “diligent” than male ones. (I’m talking about the native-born Americans).
So, if there is a problem as described by the OP, perhaps it’s more specifically a problem among young American men (of all races and social classes).
I should check out the statistical research to see if my experience reflects a nationwide situation.
There’s been many changes in all three countries since I was in college in them, and I’m generalizing from very small samples, but way back I found that at that level German students were cutthroat, American ones were quite GPA-obsessed and weren’t used to working in self-directed teams, Spanish ones were used to self-organizing but got completely befuddled by Americans asking questions about “your position within your class” (bet cher ass the Germans knew their own just fine). I think it correlated directly with how our school systems worked at the time, both on competitiveness to stay in it and on how things were organized at lower levels. The GPA obsession only counts as competitiveness if curving is part of the mix.
I don’t think that the cut-throat attitude was healthy at all, it led to a lot of stress and agressivity without producing better teachers, researchers or workers. Not sure it was quite the same as “motivation” either… the amount of time and energy they spent undermining each other and even people who weren’t part of their particular rat-race was pretty absurd.
Maybe we aren’t as competitive as we could be because we still see many examples of slackers and mediocres getting ahead and doing just fine due to having the right connections and the right intangible qualities. When it becames apparent that the playing field really is even, then perhaps you’ll see Americans sweating more.
Looking at the college/university level:
Certainly, within America, such things vary hugely from one student to another and from one college or university to another. I don’t know how you’d calculate what’s average or typical for purposes of comparison to other countries.
Certainly there are people who attend college/university primarily to party, or to play sports, or because their parents told them to, but who aren’t motivated academically. Do these factors loom as large in other counties’ higher education systems?
Are there differences among the percentages of “college-age” people who go to college in different countries? And if so, what accounts for it? Certainly in the US at least, more people go on to college nowadays than in previous generations.
To get back to this point, does anyone know of a motivation gap between US parents, teachers, politicians, and society in general in the rest of the world?
I was a highly motivated student in the UK, and a chronically unmotivated one (at least until graduate school) more or less from the moment I moved to the US. But I attended highly ranked private schools that were feeders for Uxbridge in the UK, and mediocre public schools in the US. So maybe my personal circumstances are not very helpful.
I wonder how much the more… directed(?) education systems of other countries skews the motivation curve vs. the one-size-fits-all US system?
By that, I mean that in the UK, in theory anyway, everyone takes their GCSEs at about 15 or so, and only the academically oriented go on to 6th form colleges for A-Level courses, which then get you into university, while the rest go into the trades or service industries, I suppose.
In the US, everyone is compulsorily schooled until 17-18, at which point the university types go off to school, and the rest go to trade school or service industries.
So if your sample set is equivalent to US high school seniors, the UK group is going to look more motivated, because they’re ALL the equivalent of the college-bound US students.
Compulsory schooling ends at 16 or 17 in a number of states, and of course we have a higher dropout rate. AIUI most UK students stay in school until 18 anyway because technical schools were basically phased out due to cost (they go to “secondary moderns” instead).
What a very fussy town it must be. 
I have taught a number of Chinese and South Korean students in American private high schools and there’s no question that as a group, they have a high desire for academic success and willingness to work hard, compared to my American students. You observation that they’re aware of the need to work hard to escape poverty is certainly true.
But cultural differences play a role as well. In China and South Korea, a student who fails in school has dishonored his or her family, and the social consequences can be severe. This drives students to succeed. So does the fact that corporal punishment is still the norm in those countries. That stuff shapes students’ behavior in a big way.