The Influence Of Parent-child Expectation Consistency On Test Anxiety For Secondary School Students

Education anxiety refers to the negative emotional experiences of educators(parents and teachers)in the education process due to the educated children failing to meet their goals or expectations.Parental expectations are the hopes and expectances that parents hold on the future of their children.And teachers’ expectations are the hopes and expectances that teachers hold on the future of students.Since the “Pygmalion effect” was proposed,the key of expectations research has mostly focus on the impact of teachers’ expectations on students,while ignoring the role of parental expectations and the impact of expectation consistency between parents and children.Therefore,this study is based on the ecosystem theory and starting from the family,one of the micro systems,to explore the impact of parent-child expectations consistency and parental education anxieties on test anxiety for secondary school students.The subjects of anxieties and expectations are limited to parents and their children.The parent-child expectations consistency is the similarity between parents’ expectations of their children and their children’s expectations of themselves.This research consists of two parts.The first part is to compile parental education anxiety questionnaire.After project analysis,exploratory factor analysis,confirmatory factor analysis,reliability and validity analysis,the final questionnaire come into being,including four dimensions: learning anxiety,school choosing anxiety,healthy anxiety and peer relationship anxiety.The reliability coefficients were 0.841,0.760,0.903 and 0.872,respectively.The overall reliability coefficient of the questionnaire was 0.928.The second part is to explore the mediating role of parental education anxiety in the impact of parent-child expectation consistency on test anxiety for secondary school students,in which parent-child expectations consistency as the independent variable,test anxiety for secondary school students as the dependent variable and parental education anxiety as its mediating variable.This study uses the “Parental Expectation Questionnaire”,“Self-expectation Questionnaire”,“Parental Education Anxiety Questionnaire” and the “Test Anxiety Scale”(TAS).The research objects of this study were secondary school students and their parents in the middle-income family,a total of 460 families.The study found that both parents have different focuses on their children.The mother pays more attention to the children’s academic and health,while the father pays more attention to the children’s peer relationships.Test anxiety problem is more common between high school students,and there is no significant difference between boys and girls.Due to the significant difference between parents’ expectations and education anxieties,the education anxiety of both parents should be tested as mediators separately.In order to further explore the differences between the two parents and avoid the mutual influence between the various dimensions of parental education anxiety,further mediating analysis was carried out on each dimension of parental education anxiety.The results showed when mother’s expectation is higher than her children’s self-expectation,mothers’ education anxiety,learning anxiety and healthy anxiety play the mediating role between parent-child expectations consistency and secondary school students’ test anxiety.And when mother’s expectation is lower than her children’s self-expectation,mothers’ healthy anxiety and peer relationship anxiety play the mediating role between parent-child expectation consistency and secondary school students’ test anxiety.While there is no mediating effect of father’s education anxiety in both two conditions.This indicated that mothers’ impact on children is higher than that of the father.