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Parents' stories to live by in a competitive educational landscape
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Type
Thesis
Author
Foo, Yang Yann
Supervisor
Chua, Jude Soo Meng
Hairon Salleh
Abstract
Parents in a competitive educational landscape are widely believed to be anxious about their children’s academic performance and thus rely on shadow education to help their children cope. However, little is known about alternative ways by which parents could motivate their children to develop academic competence. Knowledge in this area is important because reliance on shadow education intensifies educational competition, and such competition has been linked to student falling into depression and even committing suicide.
Using a conceptual framework consisting of Bronfenbrenner’s ecological theory, Deci and Ryan’s self-determination theory, and the concept of counter stories, this narrative inquiry study sought to understand how individuals experienced being parents to school-going children in a competitive educational landscape, especially how they motivated their children to develop academic competence amidst inadequacies perceived to exist in the formal education system. The participants were four Chinese, middle-class parents with children of
differing ages and academic abilities.
The stories of these four participants showed that their interactions with their children in the microsystem had the greatest impact on their experience of being parents in a competitive educational landscape. This could be seen in the way they developed their children’s academic competence based on their intimate knowledge of their children. This seemed to suggest that the participants, rather than being educationally competitive, were child-centric parents. Findings also showed that the participants were careful about relying on shadow education as they have found an alternative way of catalyzing their children’s extrinsic motivation to develop academic competence by fulfilling their children’s psychological needs for competence, autonomy, and relatedness. However, they perceived their children’s academic competence to be undermined by challenges such as the formal education system’s inadequate support for students with learning disabilities, and problems stemming from above-level testing.
An area for future improvement would be for researchers to corroborate and expand on the findings of this dissertation with a larger and more diverse study population.
Using a conceptual framework consisting of Bronfenbrenner’s ecological theory, Deci and Ryan’s self-determination theory, and the concept of counter stories, this narrative inquiry study sought to understand how individuals experienced being parents to school-going children in a competitive educational landscape, especially how they motivated their children to develop academic competence amidst inadequacies perceived to exist in the formal education system. The participants were four Chinese, middle-class parents with children of
differing ages and academic abilities.
The stories of these four participants showed that their interactions with their children in the microsystem had the greatest impact on their experience of being parents in a competitive educational landscape. This could be seen in the way they developed their children’s academic competence based on their intimate knowledge of their children. This seemed to suggest that the participants, rather than being educationally competitive, were child-centric parents. Findings also showed that the participants were careful about relying on shadow education as they have found an alternative way of catalyzing their children’s extrinsic motivation to develop academic competence by fulfilling their children’s psychological needs for competence, autonomy, and relatedness. However, they perceived their children’s academic competence to be undermined by challenges such as the formal education system’s inadequate support for students with learning disabilities, and problems stemming from above-level testing.
An area for future improvement would be for researchers to corroborate and expand on the findings of this dissertation with a larger and more diverse study population.
Date Issued
2018
Call Number
LB1065 Foo
Date Submitted
2018