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How are parental expectations related to students’ beliefs and their perceived achievement?

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Abstract

Research has shown that students’ beliefs related to mathematics are connected to their affect and motivation as well as their mathematical thinking and activity. Moreover, high parental expectations have been shown to play a role in students’ positive beliefs and self-efficacy. This paper reports on two studies investigating parental expectations related to students’ beliefs and their perceived achievement. These studies highlighted an unusual, but confirmed finding that students who do not perceive that their parents have specific mathematics achievement expectations show more positive mathematics-related beliefs and higher perceived mathematics achievement than students who believe their parents do have specific expectations. This paper explores possible reasons for this finding related to parents’ methods of conveying their expectations.

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Notes

  1. To correct for the issue of compounding type 1 error for multiple statistical tests, we applied the Šidák correction. To obtain a familywise alpha level of .05 for Study 1, the Šidák-adjusted alpha level is .007. All of the statistical tests in Study 1 remained significant under this correction.

  2. As in Study 1, we corrected for the issue of compounding type 1 error for multiple statistical tests by applying the Šidák correction. To obtain a familywise alpha level of .05 for Study 2, the Šidák-adjusted alpha level is .010. Thus, two of the ANOVA tests in Study 2 that would otherwise be significant at the .05 level (see Table 5) were no longer significant under this correction.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Tianjin Normal University, Tianjin, China

    Guangming Wang & Sheng Zhang

  2. University of Delaware, Newark, DE, USA

    Jinfa Cai

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  1. Guangming Wang
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  2. Sheng Zhang
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  3. Jinfa Cai
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Correspondence to Jinfa Cai.

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Wang, G., Zhang, S. & Cai, J. How are parental expectations related to students’ beliefs and their perceived achievement?. Educ Stud Math 108, 429–450 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10649-021-10073-w

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