Abstract
Data from the U.S. and Canada indicate that students’ educational expectations are often unrealistically high. Thus, the present meta-analysis tested whether students tend to decrease, on average, their educational expectations from childhood to emerging adulthood. A systematic search in the electronic databases ERIC, PsycInfo, PSYNDEX, and Web of Science identified 91 longitudinal studies the results of which were integrated with multi-level meta-analysis. While expectations about the highest future educational degree showed very small declines per year (of g = -.02 standard deviation units), the mean yearly decline of expectations about future grades was estimated to be g = -.73. Moderator analysis found a decline in expectations about the final degree only in studies from the U.S. and Canada—countries with the highest gap between expectation and future educational attainment. In addition, change in expectations about the final degree varied by age, with the strongest decline being observed around the age of 20 years. We conclude that positive expectations about the final educational attainment often tend to persist over longer intervals probably due to lacking strong counter-evidence and because of indicating a desirable outcome.
Highlights
Educational expectations address anticipated future academic achievement
Educational expectations may refer to the anticipated test score or grade in a future exam or to an educational degree one expects to achieve in life
Studies were excluded if they a) assessed hopes or aspirations rather than expectations, b) assessed expectations of parents or teachers, rather than of students, c) assessed only immediate expectation change during participation in an experiment, or d) provided only multivariate results in which change scores have been adjusted for effects of third variables (e.g., SES) because bivariate and multivariate effect sizes cannot be combined in meta-analysis (Schmid et al, 2020)
Summary
Educational expectations address anticipated future academic achievement. Educational expectations may refer to the anticipated test score or grade in a future exam or to an educational degree one expects to achieve in life (such as receiving a Bachelor’s or Master’s degree; Reynolds & Pemberton, 2001). The proportion of U.S students who expect a college or graduate degree has become much larger than the proportion of the population who attains these levels (Goyette, 2008; Jerrim, 2014). Jerrim (2014) found a 27% and 37% difference between expecting and attaining a college degree when using two data sets from the United States. Students tend to expect higher grades than they earn (Buckelew et al, 2013; Pinquart & Ebeling, 2020a)
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