A path analytical approach to parents and teacher expectation effects on achievement for middle school students

摘要

The purpose of the research was twofold: One was to identify the nature of relationships of selected structural, attitudinal, and process variables of the home and school while the other was to test the hypothetical path models of parents and teacher expectation effects on pre-adolescents school learning. It was hypothesized that parent expectations for the child\u27s achievement might be mediated by parent involvement, student expectations, and effort to achievement as well as teacher expectations might be mediated by teacher clarity, student expectations, and effort;The data were obtained from the responses of 115 sixth grade and 109 eighth grade students, their parents, and English and mathematics teachers from two public school districts in the State of Iowa;Parent and teacher variables were found to be correlated with student attitudes, effort, and achievement as measured by the ITBS language and mathematics tests. Among them, SES of the family, parent expectations and aspiration, and teacher expectations revealed relatively high correlations with not only achievement, but also with student attitudes (expectations) regardless of grade level. Student expectations were also significantly related to achievement;When statistically controlled for the effects of the student previous learning ability as measured by the CAT, the relationships between expectations and achievement became weakened. The relationships between SES and achievement controlled for ability were greatly weakened leading to practical insignificance. Despite these somewhat weakened relations, path analyses revealed that exogenous variables included in the proposed models accounted for a meaningful proportion of the variance in achievement (residual). In addition, parent and teacher expectations were related to both achievement and intermediating variables (in particular, student expectations) between teacher or parent expectations and achievement for certain models. These results indicate that parent and teacher expectations influence student achievement but that these efforts are mediated to some extent by the mediatory variables. The causal relations of the variables included in the models tended to vary with the group of students (grade level, gender, and subject area).