Growing Gains, Growing Pains: What Explains Asian American Youth’s Academic Advantage over Whites?

Asian Americans youth gradually gain an academic advantage over their white peers in the years from elementary to high school. What accounts for this Asian-white divergence in academic performance over time? Using two longitudinal data sets, the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study – Kindergarten Cohort (ECLS-K) and the Educational Longitudinal Study (ELS), we construct academic trajectories of Asians and whites in U.S. schools and attempt to answer this question. Our research rejects a cognitive explanation, i.e., Asians become cognitively more able than whites over time. Instead, we find substantial support for a non-cognitive explanation: Asian students gradually outperform white students because the former develop better non-cognitive skills than the latter over time. This research adds an already large literature attesting the importance of non-cognitive skills for child development as well as for human capital formation.