Abstract
This research seeks to explore cultural explanations of educational achievement of Gujarati children of junior school age. Chapter one establishes the multicultural education context of the research. In the second chapter, researches relating to the Gujarati communities in Britain are reviewed. The third chapter is concerned with development of a deductive theory on the basis of a set of propositions. These propositions encapsulate findings from research as well as theoretical insights into the educational achievement of Asian children. The chapter ends with a series of hypotheses about socialisation and cultural experiences of the pupils in the family and their achievement in school as well as about 'stress' between home and school. The fourth chapter entitled The Research Procedures provides an account of instrumentation undertaken in the light of the discussions in the previous chapters. The instrumentation is in the form of grids consisting of a matrix of ten constructs and twelve elements and relate to Achievement, Culture and Curriculum. The chapter also includes a description of the independent variables constructed from the grids. Explanations are also provided for the bases for the selection of statistical techniques used. The results of various statistical analyses form the subject matter of the following three chapters entitled Discussion of Results (Chapter Five), Achievement, Culture, and Curriculum (Chapter Six), and 'Deviant Cases' (Chapter Seven) respectively. Regression analyses are used to test the deductive theory. The findings indicate that the deductive theory is not supported by the evidence. Indscal analyses are used to derive salient dimensions in groups with regard to achievement, culture and the curriculum, which are described in Chapter Six. The grids for six 'deviant cases' are analysed individually using principal components analysis in order to gain further understanding of the results. This analysis highlights certain characteristics of high achieving and low achieving pupils. These are presented in Chapter Seven. The final chapter, entitled Retrospect and Prospect (Chapter Eight), provides a discussion of triangulation in theory and method to increase the utility of deductive theories and as an aid in further development of 'middle range' theories. The chapter ends with suggestions for further research.