Questioning the Model Minority: Studies of Asian American Academic Performance Nellie Tran and Dina Birman University of Illinois at Chicago The current paper reviews literature on the academic performance of Asian Americans with a critical eye toward understanding the influence of discrimination on this process. Specifically, this study seeks to understand the extent to which researchers have gathered sufficient knowledge to dispel “conventional knowledge” of Asian Americans as model minorities. We questioned the extent to which studies explicitly measured student performance as a product of individual effort and Asian cultural influences, while simultaneously measuring the impact of exposure to discrimination. We present a review of studies on Asian American academic performance published 1990 –2008. Our analysis suggests that social science research has continued to perpetuate the stereotype of Asian Americans as a “model minority.” The majority of the reviewed studies did not differentiate among Asian American ethnic and generational groups. These studies also tended to infer culture as an explanation for the high achievement of Asian Americans without examining the impact of sociopolitical factors, such as racial discrimination. In fact, many of the reviewed studies reported that Asian Americans were deficient relative to Whites on attributes thought to be related to culture (e.g., personality characteristics, parenting behaviors) while finding that they achieved aca- demically at levels similar to or higher than Whites. Finally, the majority of these studies have not used culturally appropriate methods to test their hypotheses and research questions. Thus, we recommend that studies embrace emic/population-specific and sociopolitical (Sasao & Sue, 1993) approaches to understand and explore factors that contribute to academic achievement in this group. Keywords: Asian American, academic performance, model minority, literature review The dominant image of Asian Americans as high achievers can be traced back to 1966 when Time Magazine (Peterson, 1960) and U.S. News and World Report (1966) reported on the ability of Japanese- and Chinese-Americans to achieve success in the face of the same adversities de- clared by proponents of the civil rights move- ment. Opponents of the civil rights movement argued that the United States was a racially color-blind nation of opportunities, where hard work led to success. Following this rhetoric, Asian Americans were used as examples of the “model minority” and America’s equal oppor- tunities for success. A quarter century later, Time Magazine’s “The Whiz Kid” article (Brand, 1986) again propagated this image. Since then, many published papers have de- bunked the image of Asian Americans as model minorities by considering the academic perfor- mance of specific Asian American ethnic groups (cf., Suzuki, 2002). However, the model minority rhetoric suggests more than merely that Asian Americans are high achievers be- cause they work hard. It also suggests that either the achievement of Asian Americans happens despite experiences of racial discrimination or that the United States is color-blind and racial discrimination does not occur (Lee, Wong, & Alvarez, 2009). The present paper reviewed the literature on the academic performance of Asian Americans to evaluate the extent to which em- Nellie Tran and Dina Birman, Department of Psychology, University of Illinois at Chicago. Nellie Tran is now with the Department of Psychology, University of Massachusetts, Lowell. This paper was written in part as a preliminary exam paper by Nellie Tran at the University of Illinois, Chicago under the direction of Dina Birman. She also thanks Kevin Kumashiro and Stephanie Riger for their guidance and feedback on the preliminary exam paper. Correspondence concerning this article should be ad- dressed to Nellie Tran, University of Massachusetts Lowell, Department of Psychology, 870 Broadway St., Lowell, MA 01854. E-mail: Nellie_Tran@uml.edu Asian American Journal of Psychology © 2010 American Psychological Association 2010, Vol. 1, No. 2, 106 –118 1948-1985/10/$12.00 DOI: 10.1037/a0019965 106 This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers. This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.