Influence of misaligned parents’ aspirations on long-term student academic performance

Abstract

This article deals with the concept of misaligned parents’ aspirations, its relationship with student background characteristics, and its effects on long-term student performance. It is defined as the difference between parents’ educational ambitions for their child and the child's actual capacities. Multilevel regression analyses on a sample of 10,433 Dutch students, who were followed for 5 years, showed that misaligned aspirations are related to parental education level and ethnicity, and have a small/medium positive effect on student performance. Based on ecology theory, we proposed that misaligned aspirations relate to differences in parent involvement, student achievement motivation, and teacher expectation bias, and that these factors subsequently influence student performance. The findings, however, indicate that this only applies to teacher expectation bias.

Keywords:

• misaligned parents’ aspirations
• student academic performance
• student characteristics
• teacher expectation bias
• ecology theory

Notes on contributors

Dr. Hester de Boer is a post-doc researcher at GION education/research, University of Groningen, The Netherlands. Her research interests include expectations and aspirations of teachers and parents and their influence on student academic performance, self-regulated learning, and the effects of the attributes related to the implementation and evaluation of educational intervention studies. Her methodological expertise is in multilevel analysis and meta-analysis.

Dr. Greetje (M.P.C.) van der Werf is full professor of learning and instruction at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands. Her main interests include educational effectiveness, civics and citizenship education, and the influence of psychological precursors of school success. Her expertise is in conducting large-scale multilevel longitudinal research as well as evidence-based field experiments.