Caught by surprise: The adaptation of parental expectations after unexpected ability track placement

Abstract

The study examines the adaptation of educational expectations. It focuses on the expectations that parents have of their children during the transition from primary to secondary school in Germany. During this transition, students are placed into different ability tracks. It is examined whether parents react to this information about their child's achievement by adjusting their educational expectations or whether their expectations are nonreactive to the achievement information conveyed by track placement. It is hypothesized that parents are more likely to adapt their expectations regarding final educational attainment if their child's track placement is not consistent with the expectations that they held before the track placement was known. Furthermore, SES differences in this adjustment process are expected as parents of different social status have different orientations towards achievement information. The study uses data from the National Educational Panel Study (NEPS), Starting Cohort 2 and focuses on the years between the third grade of primary school and fifth grade, which is the first year of secondary school. This means that students and parents can be followed across the moment in the academic career at which track placement happens. Furthermore, the variations in the tracking decisions across the German federal states is used to examine how the adaptation of parents’ expectations is affected based on how much influence parents have on track placement. Two-way fixed effect models are employed to model the change of expectations between the two time points in the data. The results show that low-SES parents do adjust their expectations more strongly downward when their children receive a lower track placement than expected; however, high-SES parents maintain their high expectations even in light of such negative achievement information. High- and low-SES parents do not significantly differ in their expectation adjustment if their children's track placement is higher than their previous expectations.