Reading Reports of Empirical Studies

The purpose of the Introduction is to describe the problem, develop the theoretical and empirical background for the research questions, and elaborate a rationale for all parts of the study. In order to understand why the research was conducted, you need to ask yourself the following questions:

• What are the research questions?
• Where did these research questions come from?
• Is the research important? Why or why not?

These questions set up the context and rationale for the study. Read the Introduction section of the published article and see if you can answer these questions. Then work through the summary of the introduction below. Help in addressing the questions can be found in the left column.

Where did these research questions come from?

Is this research important?

What do adolescents do all day? Do they study? Watch t.v.? Work? Just hang out? Does what adolescents do make any difference?

Stevenson, Chen and Lee (1993) found that Chinese and Japanese students performed much better than American students on mathematics and science achievement tests. Could this be related to what adolescents in the different countries do all day? Rohlen (1983) described how school activities prepare Chinese and Japanese adolescents for adulthood. Csikszentmihalyi and Larson (1984) found that American adolescents spend a large amount of their time with peers. The American media seems to have picked up on this, describing East Asian students as hard working and studious and American students as more involved in extra curricular activities, jobs, and dating.

In this study, Fuligni and Stevenson examined grade 11 students' reports of activities they engaged in during the day and related their time use with mathematics achievement.

They selected students from Minneapolis (United States), Taipei (Taiwan - representing China), and Sendai (Japan).