Today's New York Times has an article on the demographic make-up of top American universities' undergraduate student bodies, with a focus on the large percentages of Asian-American students at these institutions ("Little Asia on the Hill," by Timothy Egan). Here is a link to the article; note, however, that you may have to complete the free registration and the article will probably disappear from free access in a few days, anyway. Those of you at universities whose libraries have online subscriptions to LexisNexis might try seeking the article through that option.
Hazel Markus, a social psychology professor at Michigan from 1975-1994 before moving to Stanford, was quoted in the article, as seen in the following excerpt:
Hazel R. Markus lectures on this very subject as a professor of psychology at Stanford and co-director of its Research Institute for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity. Her studies have found that Asian students do approach academics differently. Whether educated in the United States or abroad, she says, they see professors as authority figures to be listened to, not challenged in the back-and-forth Socratic tradition. “You hear some teachers say that the Asian kids get great grades but just sit there and don’t participate,” she says.
One of the main findings of cross-cultural psychology is that Asian cultures tend to be more collectivist, with more of a premium on maintaining harmony within the group, than is the case in the U.S. In the above excerpt, I can see Asian students' stance toward professors as being consistent with preservation of harmony within the classroom. However, such a demeanor may also create the seeming paradox of Asian students being perceived as excessively individualistic.