AbstractsEducation Research & Administration

Abstract

With the support of national policy, China’s university has extended its enrollment rate in the late 1990s. An increasing number of high school graduates have more opportunities to receive higher education. However, college entrance examination is still a difficult mission for all students who want to enter university. The unequal distribution of educational resources and the huge difference of learning environment between rural areas and cities lead to disadvantaged students who live in low-culture families have to put more effort in their study. With the increasingly aggravating social competition, university students who face the employment pressure have different academic performance. All the while rural students are highly competitive in schooling. There are extensive research findings that have proved that students’ aspiration of achieving the academic goal is influenced by their family. This study draws upon a qualitative approach to examine the effect of family background on students’ learning motivation. More specifically, the primary goal of this study is to build upon the limited work on interpreting cultural capital in the context of Chinese family to analyze the direct and indirect influences of cultural capital on university students’ motivation of achieving higher academic goal. Thus, the main research question is: How is cultural capital interpreted in the context of Chinese family, and how university student’s achievement motivation influenced by this cultural capital? To better explore this research question, four sub-questions are formulated, they are: To what extent is Bourdieu’s cultural capital theory fitted into the Chinese family, namely, how does cultural capital theory embody in the Chinese family? What are the characters of the Chinese family cultural capital? What do family factors influence university student’s achievement motivation? Whether does family cultural capital influence university student’s achievement motivation? If so, how? Based on the narrative data that is collected by applying in-depth interview with university students, this thesis provides thoughtful and descriptive analysis on how the family cultural capital in Chinese family looks like and try to analyze to what extent the key point of cultural capital, so called habitus functions in the process of studying of university students. Also, this study aims to find the relation between family cultural capital and students’ achievement motivation, by doing so an explanation of why disadvantaged students whose parents are little schooling always get good academic success will present. Key words: university student, cultural capital, achievement motivation, family, habitus