The effect of the education level of parents, students' expectations, attitudes, and language spoken at home on achievement for migrant students: in Australia and Canada

Migrant students are reported to have a lower achievement compared to the native students in the country they or their parents migrated to. This study, therefore, tried to investigate the achievement of migrant students, specifically those with highly skilled parents (India, China, and The Philippines), in Australia and Canada. This was done using a quantitative and cross-sectional design, as a secondary analysis of PISA 2018. The research question of this study concentrated on the relationship between achievement and migration background. To find out which factors influence achievement the most, linear regressions were conducted to study this relationship. The control variables were the educational background of parents, occupational expectations of students, their attitudes towards school, and test language spoken at home. The findings of this study showed that migrant students with highly-educated parents achieve similar or higher than natives. Specifically, the Chinese migrant students achieve significantly higher than native students in both Australia and Canada. The occupational expectations of a student had the strongest correlation to achievement among the control variables in this study. Further details of findings and implications were elaborated upon.