![[ Visit Client Website ]](images/banner.gif)
Background: In China, more than 36 million children of rural workers have migrated from rural to urban areas. Due to China’s household-registration system, migrant children often have limited access to social and educational services. Compared to their counterparts in cities, migrant children face greater challenges to achieve academic success. Research suggests that household educational assets (e.g., savings for college education) and parental educational expectations play important roles to promote children’s educational achievement. Using a sample of children collected in Beijing, China, this study examined whether the associations of children’s academic achievement with educational assets and parental expectations vary by family migration status.
Methods: The study collected survey information from 491 migrant families and 290 nonmigrant families with children age 7-16 in 2014. Sample families were selected from three neighborhoods with a high proportion of migrant families in Beijing. Children’s academic achievement was measured by parent-reported performance on math, language art, and English (1= Excellent and 0 = otherwise). Parental education expectation toward children was indicated by a six-level ordinal variable ranging from not expecting the child to attend college (0), expecting but with a small chance (1), to expecting and with a very high chance (5). A 8-level ordinal variable was used to measure how much parents saved monthly for children’s future education, ranging from not saving at all (0), saving less than 50 Yuan (1) to saving more than 300 Yuan (7). We included three dichotomous indicators of academic performance in a Confirmatory Factor Analysis, and examined the mediation from educational assets, parental expectation, to academic performance by migration status in a Structural Equations Model (SEM). The analyses controlled multiple demographic and socioeconomic characteristics (e.g., children’s age and gender, family income, and parents’ education).
Results: Compared to nonmigrant ones, migrant children had lower academic performance on all three subjects, lower educational expectations from parents, and were less likely to have educational assets prepared by parents. The SEM mediation analysis including all children suggested that educational assets statistically increased the level of parental expectation (b=.05, p<.01), and parental expectation was positively associated with academic performance (b=.07, p<.001); there was no a direct association between academic achievement and educational assets. In the multiple group SEM analysis, these results still hold for migrant children, with even greater regression coefficients; however, the association between parental expectation and educational assets for nonmigrant children was positive but not statistically significant.
Implications: Consistent with previous research, findings suggest the importance of educational assets and parental expectations on children’s academic achievement, particularly for migrant children. In the global context, different asset-building programs have been proposed and initiated to improve individual development. Findings suggest such programs may have potential to reduce the development disparity between migrant and nonmigrant children in China. The nonsignifiant association between education assets and parental expectation for nonmigrant children could be caused by the small size of nonmirgrant children in the sample.