Chinese immigrant students in Hong Kong: Exploring performance and influences on their civic learning

Area of Science:

• Education
• Sociology
• Civic Education

Background:

• The "opportunity-propensity" (O-P) framework guides the exploration of immigrant students' civic knowledge.
• Socioeconomic status (SES), school civic learning, and civic participation are key antecedent and opportunity factors.
• Perceived classroom climate, student-teacher relationships, and the importance of conventional citizenship represent propensity factors.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the influence of immigrant status on students' civic knowledge within the O-P framework.
• To examine the mediating roles of SES, school-based civic learning, and perceived classroom environment.
• To differentiate between student-level and school-level effects on civic knowledge.

Main Methods:

• Utilized data from the International Civic and Citizenship Education Study (ICCS) 2016.
• Employed two-level path analysis on a sample of 2,544 eighth graders in Hong Kong.
• Analyzed both individual student characteristics and aggregated school-level data.

Main Results:

• At the student level, mainland Chinese immigrant students exhibited higher civic knowledge.
• Perceived open classroom climate and the importance of conventional citizenship positively mediated civic knowledge, while family SES negatively mediated it via civic learning, with small effect sizes.
• At the school level, aggregated immigrant status positively correlated with aggregated civic knowledge, with a negative pathway through aggregated SES and civic learning.

Conclusions:

• School-level immigrant status is a significant positive predictor of aggregated civic knowledge.
• Individual-level factors show limited mediation effects on civic knowledge for immigrant students.
• The study highlights the importance of considering both individual and contextual (school-level) factors in understanding immigrant students' civic development.