The Influence Mechanism Of Parents' Educational Expectation On Junior High School Students' Cognitive Ability

The famous 'Rosenthal Experiment' has revealed the important role of educational expectations on students' development.In recent years,the Wisconsin School has further verified the important intermediary role of parents' educational expectations on family socioeconomic status and academic performance of individuals.Many evidences have shown that individual educational expectations during adolescence play a decisive role in their growth and will influence their ultimate educational acquisition.This article was aimed to verify whether educational expectation can predict the students' cognitive ability among other important variables independently and to clarify the mechanism of how it works.Using bootstrap sampling method to test the mediating effect of the perceived pressure caused by parents' educational expectation and students'self educational expectation.By testing up to 8994 junior middle school students tracking data from Chinese Education Tracking Survey database(CEPS),the empirical test results shows that:(1)parents' educational expectation can positively predict cognitive ability in junior middle school students.(2)Differentiation analysis of students' gender and household registration shows that compared with male and non-agricultural household registration students,educational expectation of female and agricultural household registration students has a greater impact on the acquisition of cognitive ability.(3)Students' self-education expectations played an intermediary role in the prediction of parents' educational expectations on junior high school students' cognitive ability.(4)Students' perceived pressure caused by parents' educational expectations mediated the relationship between students' self-education expectations and parents' educational expectations and their cognitive abilities.(5)Pressure and students' self educational expectation has a chain intermediary effect in the relationship of students perceived parents education expectation on between cognitive ability.Based on the above research results,this paper proposed suggestions include that parents' educational expectations should be treated independently;the government should formulate some policies to protect children of disadvantage minority;reasonable educational expectations should be given to adolescents to help them improve their cognitive abilities and strengthening home-school cooperation and social publicity,improving citizens' attention of educational expectations from the macro level to promote educational equity.