Parents or teachers: whose guidance matters more in students’ alignment of educational plan and achievement? A comparative study of Taiwan and Hong Kong

ABSTRACT

While existing research has well-recognized educational plan as an important predictor of students’ educational achievement, the alignment of educational plan and achievement should not be taken for granted. As plan-achievement misalignment is liable to negative psychological and social consequences, this study aims to examine the extent to which parents vis-à-vis teachers could guide students into plan-achievement alignment. Specifically, this study is set within two comparable cases of Taiwan and Hong Kong to explore whether the relative importance of parents’ and teachers’ guidance would differ according to the institutional contexts of education systems. Methodologically, society-specific (multinomial) logistic regression analyses are conducted based on the data of the Taiwan Education Panel Survey and the Hong Kong Survey on High School Students’ Aspirations for Higher Education and Employment. In Taiwan, we find students not only received more guidance from parents, but parents’ guidance was also more effective in helping them reach plan-achievement alignment. By contrast, teachers are found to have played a key role in these regards in Hong Kong. The findings provide support to our propositions that the relative importance of parents’ and teachers’ guidance may vary by the opportunity structures of post-secondary education and the level of school-based parental involvement.

KEYWORDS:

• Plan-achievement alignment
• post-secondary transition
• parents’ guidance
• teachers’ guidance
• comparative study

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the editors of Asia Pacific Journal of Education and two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments and generous support. Data analysed in this paper were collected by the research project “Hong Kong Survey on High School Students’ Aspirations for Higher Education and Employment” supported by the Central Policy Unit (which has been re-organised as the Policy Innovation and Co-ordination Office) of the Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region [reference number: CUHK4006-PPR-12]; and the research project “Taiwan Education Panel Survey (and Beyond)” sponsored by Academia Sinica, Ministry of Education, National Academy for Educational Research and National Science Council. The authors appreciate the assistance in providing data by the institutes aforementioned.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data availability statement

The data that supports the findings of this study for the Taiwan case is available from the Survey Research Data Archive of Academia Sinica at http://srda.sinica.edu.tw. However, the data that supports the findings of this study for the Hong Kong case is not publicly available due to restrictions.

Notes

1. Peers are also students’ significant others. However, as peers are inexperienced in giving advice on post-secondary transition, we decide to exclude peers from our study and focus on adult significant others instead.

2. Although the data was collected more than 10 years ago, we believe our findings based on this dataset are still applicable today. As it will be presented in the findings and discussions section, the institutional contexts we proposed in the literature review that might affect the relative importance of parents’ and teachers’ guidance have not undergone major changes in Taiwan since the time of data collection.

3. Students enrolled in 5-year junior colleges in 2005 are deleted because they would directly enter the 2-year junior technical colleges upon high-school graduation.

4. To evaluate if this relatively high attrition rate would severely affect our research findings, we compared the two groups of students who did and who did not participate in the follow-up survey and found no significant differences in their demographic characteristics.

5. As introduced in the data and sample section, the multi-stage sampling methods denote the multi-level nature of the Taiwan and Hong Kong data, that is, the student samples were selected on the basis of the sampled schools. However, multi-level (multinomial) logistic regression models are not adopted in this paper out of two reasons. First and foremost, neither our research question nor theoretical propositions have suggested multi-level effects that need to be modelled. Secondly, students’ school codes are not disclosed to the public in the Taiwan data, which prevents us from employing a multi-level model in the Taiwan case. However, for the Hong Kong case, we additionally run multi-level (multinomial) logistic regressions with clustered standard errors to cross-check if the results presented in this paper are sensitive to the multi-level data structure. We find the results of multi-level (multinomial) logistic regressions are similar to and consistent with the findings presented in this study for Hong Kong.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Central Policy Unit (which has been re-organised as the Policy Innovation and Co-ordination Office), The Government of the Hong KongSpecial Administrative Region [reference number: CUHK4006-PPR-12].

Notes on contributors

Nan Xiang

Nan Xiang is a doctoral candidate in Sociology in the Department of Sociology, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong. She obtained her Bachelor’s degree at Fudan University (China) and Master’s degree at The University of Oxford (UK).

Stephen Wing-kai Chiu

Stephen Wing-kai Chiu is the Chair Professor of Sociology in the Department of Social Sciences, the Co-Director of The Academy of Hong Kong Studies, and the Associate Dean of Faculty of Liberal Arts and Social Science, The Education University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong. Professor Chiu obtained his Bachelor’s and MPhil degrees at The University of Hong Kong and his Doctoral degree from Princeton University (US).