There is solid evidence that East-Asian students excel in academics. International studies of education achievement document this for East-Asian societies and for East-Asian-heritage pupils living in other cultures. Over the decades, various explanations have been discussed. Recently, the actiotope model of giftedness and the allied concept of learning and educational capital have been suggested as a framework that can offer new insights into East-Asian high academic achievement. In this context, more attention has been given to the endogenous resources conceptualized by learning capital than to the exogenous resources described by educational capital. In the case of cultural educational capital, which is one of five types of educational capital, cross-cultural research suggests that such differences do, in fact, exist that can help explain East-Asian high achievement. However, existing studies lack simultaneously high levels of ecological and external validity. We thus examine large samples of news writing from English-language news outlets in East Asia (n = 23) and in the United States (n = 28) for evidence of higher levels of cultural educational capital in East Asia. The samples together comprise 121,310,108 words from all issues of the sampled news sources (N = 51) for the period from 1 June 2012 to 31 May 2013. In particular, we assess (a) the overall extent of education-related coverage, (b) the amount of attention paid to learning and school, and (c) the frequency of negative and positive emotion words in school-related reporting. While we find clear differences in the first two areas between the East-Asian and the U.S. samples, results on the usage of emotion words were less conclusive.

Author(s): Daniel Patrick Balestrini, (University of Regensburg, Germany), Heidrun Stoeger (Chair Professor for School Research, School Development, and Evaluation, University of Regensburg, Germany)