Academic Perceptions of Immigrant and Minority Postsecondary Students

Bette DeBellefeuille
, Philip C. Abrami

Abstract

This investigation compared postsecondary students whose mother tongue was English and who were natives of Canada (TV = 117) with minority students (N = 91) in terms of: a) the perceived importance of a university education and the perceived likelihood of academic success; b) the estimated likelihood of success at both competitive and noncompetitive tasks; c) the causal attributions for task outcomes and affective reactions to those outcomes and d) one projective and fourobjective fear of success  (FOS) measures. English Canadian students and minority students held equivalent views on the importance of a university education and a successful career. FOS scores did not differ between the groups regardless of the measure used, either for males or females. Although there were few differences between the groups in their reaction to competitive, achievement-oriented tasks, there were more differences between the groups in their reactions to noncompetitive tasks. Here, minority students expressed some negative affective reactions. The minority students believed that external factors, particularly luck, had a greater influence on task outcome than did English Canadians.

Metrics

Metrics Loading ...

Published

2018-04-30



Section

Articles



License

Copyright in the article is vested with the Author under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 Canada license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/ca/. Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:

  1. Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
  2. Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.

Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).


How to Cite

DeBellefeuille, B., & Abrami, P. C. (2018). Academic Perceptions of Immigrant and Minority Postsecondary Students. Canadian Journal of Higher Education, 16(3). https://doi.org/10.47678/cjhe.v16i3.188405