Parents' Educational Expectations and their Social-Psychological Patterning

Abstract

This study set out to examine the ways in which the educational position of parents organizes the associations between their assessments of the competence of their children and their educational expectations for their children. The subjects represented two contrasting groups in terms of their post-primary education: academically educated (n = 126) and vocationally educated (n = 375) parents. They were asked to assess their child's abilities and school success and to estimate the probability of their child's entering gymnasium (upper secondary school). The results indicated that for the academically educated parents their child's entering gymnasium was almost self-evident, whereas for the vocationally educated parents it was a choice situation. The educational expectations of the vocationally educated parents were more strongly and in more ways patterned according to the competence estimations than were those of the academically educated parents. The expectations of the academically educated parents were organized by a dualistic differentiation between the cognitive and the practical abilities, while those of the vocationally educated parents were organized by their assessments of the child's cognitive competence and school orientation. The findings suggest that the interpretations parents make of their children's competence can be regarded as social representations of educability: they organize educational expectations socially, contain an evaluative hierarchy of abilities and their use varies according to the educational position of the parent.