Does Confucian Culture Make Difference on Student Achievement?Cmchang@Mail.Ndhu.Edu.Tw

The purpose of this study is to use Taiwan Assessment of Student Achievement database 2006, in which sixth grade student test scores as the dependent variable to explore the relationships between the achievements and student common background variables and individual disciplines learning variables by using data mining, the decision tree method.

 In TASA database, common background of sixth-grade students are 28 variables, and the result shows the common background variables for all subjects have discriminating effects.  Two phenomena are interesting :( a) on Chinese, mathematics, natural, and social science, fewer and more concentrate common background variables make differences.  On the other hand, for English subject the impact variables are distributed more widely; (b) the impact of variables to each subjects can be divided into three main aggregation scope: The first part is the student's native family backgrounds, including students’ ethnic groups, their parents' education level and occupation, and whether to accept free lunch program; the second part is the time for students to use at home, including the completion of homework, reading, watching TV, and use the amount of computer time; the third part is the habit of reading, including reading like essays, novels, adventure, or detective books.

 In addition to background variables, this study also analyzed students’ achievement with disciplines learning variables.  It is interesting to find, except to English subject, background variables have no discrimination effect on learning outcomes to the remaining four subjects, when disciplines learning variables were added to the analysis.