Educational Expectations and Academic Achievement among Middle and High School Students
2007; Project Innovation Austin; Volume: 127; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0013-1172
Autores Tópico(s)Education, Achievement, and Giftedness
ResumoStudents' expectations of the highest level of education that they would attain correlate with their academic performance (Mau, 1995). The direction of this relationship, however, is less clear. Some studies (e.g., Seginer & Vermulst, 2002) test the possibility that students' expectations precede their academic achievement. Other studies (e.g., Davies & Kandel, 1981) test the possibility that students' academic performance precedes their educational expectations. The current study examined the prospective relationships between educational expectations and academic achievement with panel data collected from students when they were in Grades 8, 10, and 12. Using a cross-lagged model, this study tested three hypotheses: (a) educational expectations precede academic achievement, (b) academic achievement precedes educational expectations, and (c) educational expectations and academic achievement have reciprocal effects on each other. It was predicted that the results would support the hypothesis of reciprocal effects. This prediction was based on Wigfield and Karpathian's (1991 ) developmental perspective that as students progress through school, their academic self-assessments would be more systematically related to external academic outcomes, such as test scores. The current study expected that, by the time students are in middle school and high school, a systematic relationship between their educational expectations and academic achievement would be due to reciprocal effects between these two variables. Method Sample The data for this report come from NELS, which selected a sample of 24,599 eighth graders from 1,052 schools in the United States in 1988. The students completed a questionnaire on a variety of topics including their educational expectations in Grades 8, 10, and 12. The students also completed standardized tests on math and reading in those same grades. By Grade 12, NELS had responses from 16,489 of the original participants. For this report, only those who had complete data for the study variables were selected. Among the 10,262 selected students, 51% were female and 74% were White. Measures Similar to prior research (e.g., Kaplan, Liu, & Kaplan, 2005; Seginer & Vermulst, 2002), this study used single-item measures of educational expectations. In Grade 8, students reported their expectations on a 6-point scale, ranging from 1 (less than high school) to 6 (higher school after college). In Grade 10, students reported their expectations on a 9-point scale, ranging from l(less than high school) to 9 (Ph.D., M.D.). In Grade 12, students reported their expectations on a 10-point scale, ranging from l(less than high school) to 10 (Ph.D., M.D, other). Students completed standardized tests on reading and math in Grades 8, 10, and 12. The reading tests assessed students' ability to recall details, comprehend statements, and make inferences. The math tests assessed students' math declarative knowledge, understanding/comprehension, and problem solving skills. The reliabilities of these tests were .80 or higher across the three grades (Rock, Pollack, & Quinn, 1995). Because the correlation between the reading test score and the math test score within each grade was high (ranging from .71 to .76.; Rock et al., 1995), the sum of these two scores within each grade was used as the measure of academic achievement. Results Table 1 shows descriptive statistics for the study variables and correlations among them. Across the grades, the correlations between students' educational expectations and standardized test scores were moderately positive (r's = .41 to .48). The structural relationship between educational expectations and academic achievement was examined with AMOS 6.0. The tested model is shown in Figure 1. With significance set at p
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