Abstract
To clarify how Japanese youths shape their educational expectations, this study examines determinants of eighth-grade students' educational expectations in Japan, Netherlands and the United States. A cross-national analysis using data from TIMSS2003 shows that (1) Japanese students shape realistic expectations about their educational attainment as Dutch students do. On the contrary, American students tend to have more unrealistic educational expectations. (2) The effect of academic performance on educational expectation is weaker in the United States, but does not significantly vary between Japan and Netherlands. (3) The effect of socio-economic background on educational expectation does not vary among three countries. These results suggest that the formation of educational expectations in Japan moderately resembles that in Netherlands where students are sorted at an early age into different types of secondary schools under the "highly differentiated educational system" rather than that in the United States where there exists the undifferential education system.
