It is observed that the number of immigrant brides in Taiwan has been increased in late 1990s. The proportion of immigrant brides accounts for 14.1% of total married couples in 1998 and this ratio go up higher to 28.4% in 2003. Meanwhile, the children of immigrant mothers are only 1.39% in elementary schools in 2003 semester, but the proportion dramatically increases to 5.19% in 2007. With both increase in foreign spouses (in particular the brides) and their kids, the trend will definitely bring an impact on many dimensions such as education, fertility, labor forces, etc. in Taiwanese society. This study aims to examine the academic achievement between pupils of immigrant mothers and native mothers in Taiwan. Specifically, we attempt to investigate the following questions: Is there a gap of academic performance between these two groups of children? Does the gap of academic performance between these two groups of children matter across various subjects (e.g., Mathematics, English, Chinese Literature, Science and Society)? How would the gap change as the kids grow up?
Data/Methods
The empirical application in this paper is implemented by the Taiwan Assessment of Student Achievement (TASA), which was financed by Ministry of Education and was conducted to investigate the elementary school and high school students' academic achievement. TASA includes three waves (i.e., 2005, 2006 and 2007) and test scores for five subjects (Mathematics, English, Chinese Literature, Science and Society) taught in elementary schools, as well as students' individual characteristics and family socio-economic backgrounds.
Ordinary least squares (OLS) method is adopted to verify whether there is a significant performance gap for the two groups of kids (namely, with foreign-born and native-born mothers). This empirical evaluation is done for the 4th and 6th grades, for the five subjects, and for the three waves, respectively. In each evaluation, we consider three different models, depending upon the extent to which regressors are controlled. The first set estimates include mothers' nationality of students as the only right-hand-side variable. The second set examines the difference of the two groups by controlling the individual and mother's socio-economic background. Finally, we augment the previous two setting by including the father's socio-economic background in our regression model.
Results
The preliminary result shows that there is a gap of academic performance between the two groups of students with foreign and native mothers. When we control the family socio-economic background, the gaps tend to shrink or even turn to disappear. As the children grow from the 4th to 6th grade, the gaps between the two groups do not get large at least. When compared to various subjects, the gaps in Science are always in-significant when students are in their 6th grades. In addition, Chinese, English, Math and Science reveal significant gaps between the two groups in the 4th grades but the reduced gaps are found in the 6th grades. Our results seem robust in regard to different waves of the data. The empirical finding suggests that the school/government should pay more attention to the students whose mothers are immigrants.