Parental Expectations

Relation of Parental Expectations to Student Achievement

The relation between parental expectations and student achievement has been established in many empirical studies. Parents who hold high expectations for their children's grades or performance on examinations tend to have children who subsequently receive higher grades, achieve higher scores on standardized tests, hold higher aspirations for future educational and occupational attainment, and persist in their schooling. Several meta-analyses have found that parental expectations are the strongest family-level predictor of student achievement outcomes, exceeding the variance accounted for by other parental beliefs and behaviors by a substantial margin. By controlling on the effects of early [Page 754]achievement, the results of longitudinal studies offer particularly powerful proof that parental expectations are a causal determinant of student outcomes.

Causal Mechanisms Linking Parental Expectations to Student Achievement

Early accounts by sociologists postulated that parental expectations signaled information to students about their capabilities that was then incorporated into students' aspirations for achievement. Social cognitive theorists have similarly argued that high parental expectations contribute to scholastic achievement by raising students' academic self-efficacy and aspirations, as well as by bolstering their confidence in counteracting peer pressure to engage in detrimental pursuits.

A second line of work, emerging in the 1960s and 1970s, introduced the notion of “achievement press,” arguing that parental expectations create a psychological demand to realize those expectations. The notion that parental expectations create a pressure to achieve is reflected in current work examining whether high expectations may sometimes cause emotional stress in children. A third line of inquiry has focused on how parental expectations catalyze parent efforts to engage in specific forms of teaching, monitoring, and supervision of their children's learning; to shape the child's academic environment; or to form connections with the school. A fourth perspective emphasizes the connection between high expectations and parents' emotional support for student achievement. Following James Coleman's notion of social capital, these theorists argue that positive parent–child interactions express themselves in the form of high parental expectations, thus establishing parental expectations as the mediator rather than an exogenous determinant of nurturing relations.

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