Title:	FOR WHICH SOCIOECONOMIC SEGMENTS ARE PARENTAL EXPECTATIONS OF EDUCATIONAL ATTAINMENT MORE SENSITIVE TO THEIR CHILDREN PERFORMANCE?
Author(s):	Roberto Araya, Raúl Gormaz and Obed Ulloa
ISBN:	978-989-8533-73-9
Editors:	Theodora Issa, Tomayess Issa, Pedro Isaias and Ana Hol
Year:	2017
Edition:	Single
Keywords:	Parental Expectations, Educational Data Mining, Student Achievement, Parents’ Rights
Type:	Full Paper
First Page:	51
Last Page:	58
Language:	English
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Full Contents:	click to dowload
Paper Abstract:	We performed data mining using several databases. We analyzed 2,158,925 survey responses from parents of fourth graders sitting a national standardized test (SIMCE) in Chile between 2005 and 2015. One of the questions for the parents was about their expectations of the ultimate educational attainment for their child’s academic future. Using the parents’ responses to this question, as well as two different databases with the students’ performance we studied how sensitive are parental expectations on their children performance. We first found that parents of the two lowest socioeconomic status (SES) segments (about 39% of the population) with children at the 20% highest score have average expectations of attainment much lower than the average expectations of parents from the two higher SES segments (26% of the population) but with kids on the lowest 20% score on SIMCE. We also found that the gap in expectations due to SES has been narrowing since 2005. Furthermore, we present multiple findings on how sensitive parents’ expectations are to their child’s academic performance. When based on SIMCE scores, we found that parental expectations among higher SES parents are less sensitive to academic performance than lower SES parents. These expectations may be due to a ceiling effect, as these parental expectations are closer to the top. However, if we measure the effect in terms of standard deviations of expectations within each socioeconomic segment, then a unit change in the SIMCE score has a larger effect on parental expectations among higher socioeconomic groups. On the other hand, if we take the students’ grade point average instead of their SIMCE score, then there is not much difference between socioeconomic segments when it comes to how sensitive the parents’ expectations are. These findings have important implications for public policy.
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