Parents' Immediate Performance Expectations and Adolescent Achievement: Racial Differences in Use and Effects

Background and purpose: Parent expectations for achievement are often seen as a malleable point of intervention in social workers’ and school personnel’s targeted efforts to improve student performance.  Surprisingly, however, the vast majority of the research on the effects of parent expectations focuses exclusively on parents’ anticipation of students’ long-term school persistence, with little consideration of short term expectations such as those for more immediate academic performance (e.g. grades in school). Meanwhile, research has validated several parenting practices that are uniquely beneficial to African American student achievement, yet in this regard as well, immediate expectations for academic performance are virtually unexplored. In response, the present study examines the degree to which parents’ immediate expectations for academic performance impact school achievement in adolescence, and whether there are racial differences in the use and effects of these practices. Given extant research on the value of stricter parenting practices in many of the social contexts that African Americans face, we hypothesize that parents’ immediate performance requirements will hold greater benefits to African American adolescents than they will for their White counterparts.

Methods:  Participants come from the Adolescent Development in Context Study, a longitudinal study of secondary school students and parents in an urban county on the East Coast of the United States (n=406). Individual interviews and surveys with parents and youth were conducted during the summer before 9^th grade (mean age = 14.5 years), and again during the 11^th grade school year (mean age= 17.4). For this study hierarchical regression analyses were used to determine whether parents’ minimum grade requirements at Time 1 were associated with higher student GPA at Time 2, independent of economic background and prior achievement.

Results: Results reveal that while only 50% of White 9^th grade parents report holding minimum grade requirements, 87% of African American parents did. Results also show that independent of economic background and prior achievement, among African American families these requirements for immediate performance were positively related to 11^th grade GPA for students (b=1.16, t=2.95, p=.003), while for white students they were not (b=0.18, t=0.84, p=.403). Finally, results show that once 9^th grade parents’ immediate performance requirements are accounted for, their long-term expectations for persistence are no longer significant predictors of African American adolescents’ achievement (b=0.06, t=0.04, p=.12).

Conclusion and implications: Results here suggest that shorter term performance expectations are an important predictor of African American student achievement, perhaps more so  than are expectations for long-term persistence.  As such, these immediate expectations merit much greater research attention, including further explorations of the contexts and approaches by which they are particularly effective. For practitioners, the culturally distinct nature of these effects are uniquely promising to social workers and school personnel working to narrow racial disparities in school success. Ultimately, these results provide additional support for the validation of a culturally distinct set of optimal parenting approaches for African American families. Understanding these approaches greatly increases our capacity to provide evidence-based, culturally relevant policy and practices to the African American youth we serve.