Parents' School Behavior Expectations and the Academic Performance of Middle School Students: A Longitudinal Analysis

Background and Purpose: The sixth grade is a pivotal year for students as they move from the primary to the secondary grades. For students who attend middle school in the sixth grade, they move from a primary school with one teacher to a school setting where they change classes, experience multiple teachers, and where they must assume more independence and personal responsibility for their learning. The role of peers intensifies in this transition as students attempt to forge their identity and find their place in the peer group.

Not all students are equally successful in making this transition. One marker of success is the performance of students on end-of-grade academic achievement in reading and math. In this presentation, we address the following question: what did we know about students at the beginning of the sixth grade that would have allowed us to have predicted their performance on end-of-grade tests in reading and math at the end of the seventh grade? Informed by a risk and resilience perspective, we focus our attention on students' reports of the school behavior expectations of their parents. As a mechanism of social control, the influence of this variable is examined in the context of students' reports about their ability to avoid getting into trouble at school and their perceptions of social support from neighbors, teachers, parents, and friends.

Methods: We conducted a secondary analysis, using a combination of self-report and administrative data, on a sample of 1,800 sixth graders in 11 ethnically diverse middle schools in North Carolina. The contribution of school behavior expectations was tested using four-part stepwise models, with seventh grade reading and math end-of-grade exam scores entered as dependent variables. The first step contained student demographics. In the second step, trouble avoidance was added. In the third step, four support measures (neighbor, teacher, parent and friend) were added. In the fourth step, parents' school behavior expectations was added. Hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) was used to account for the nesting of students within schools, and multiple imputation was used to address missing data.

Results: Trouble avoidance was a significant protective factor, associated with higher math and reading scores (p < .001). Friend support was a significant protective factor for reading (p < .05) and math (p < .01); this was true whether or not school behavior expectations—also protective and significant (p < .001)—was entered. Overall, the models, including demographics, accounted for more than 1/3 of the variance in each outcome. Intraclass correlations were low for both math (.027) and reading (.018).

Conclusions and Implications: End-of-grade performance in reading and math is associated with both promotion and eventual high school completion. The identification of substantive variables that are predictive of future performance offers leverage as intervention targets to school-based practitioners, including the relative value of directing time and energy to working with parents to more clearly and forcefully communicate their expectations for school-related behavior.