Chapter 3: Self-Schema, Motivation and Learning: A Cross-Cultural Comparison

This chapter examines differences in students’ academic self-schemas in two cultural contexts, namely, Australia and Hong Kong. As a child, the first author, Ng, attended school in Hong Kong and eventually taught in the Hong Kong system before moving to Australia to complete doctoral studies. Like many educators and researchers, he puzzled over the dramatic differences in the motivation of students both within and between cultural contexts. This chapter represents one of the outcomes of this process of puzzlement, inquiry and search for understanding. We argue below that a focus on students’ self-schemas provides an integrated approach to investigating motivational differences within and between cultural contexts. We suggest that cultural and contextual factors create subtle but important differences in the academic self-schemas of successful and unsuccessful students. Aside from the concern with the consistency of the effects of self-schemas on learning across cultures, cross-cultural comparisons provide insights into how certain salient cultural values influence students’ self-schemas, motivational qualities and learning behaviors. These cultural values can be taken collectively as a form of cultural model of success (c.f. D’Andrade & Strauss, 1992). We argue that the different cultural models of success operating in Hong Kong and Australia influence students’ self-schemas.