Session Information
24 SES 08, Multiethnic Environment & Comparative Studies
Paper Session
Contribution
The problem of students dropping out of mathematics, especially advanced mathematics, has become one of the major contemporary concerns of educators, parents, and politicians about mathematics education (Ma, 2001). Students’ dispositions towards mathematics influence their decisions to choose advanced mathematics at school and to pursue further studies in mathematically demanding courses in Higher Education (HE). The present study aims to investigate which factors affect students’ dispositions to study further mathematics and the role of parental aspirations in particular.
Elliot, Hufton, Illushin and Willis (2001) stress the importance of culture in shaping parental expectations and highlight the important role of parents in instilling attitudes and behaviours in their children. Mau (1997) remarks that the degree of parental expectation which is perceived by students differs between cultural/ethnic groups and has a direct impact on children’s academic performance. Parental influence may be different in different social and cultural contexts for boys and girls, but exactly how much and why is not well understood. The aim of the present study is to better understand how sociocultural context, including gender mediate parental influences on students’ dispositions to study further mathematics.
This study aims to address two research questions:
1. What is the relationship between parental educational aspirations and their offspring’s dispositions towards mathematics, and how does it depend on background class, gender, nationality and other variables?
2. How does culture, operationalised as cultural narratives (Bruner, 1996), mediate parental influences on students’ dispositions?
The study will involve an exploration of the way parental aspirations are culturally mediated in the narratives of students through a diverse set of individual students’ interviews. Data from England will be drawn from the ESRC-TLRP project ‘Keeping open the door to mathematically demanding programmes in further and Higher Education’, which investigated students’ dispositions to study mathematically demanding courses in HE and effects of different socio-cultural backgrounds. Over 40 students were interviewed up to four occasions. The students’ interviews tracked their view of mathematics, their aspirations for higher education and their future generally (Williams et al., 2008). A theme that emerged in the ESRC-TLRP interviews was parental influence on students’ university subject choice and cultural differences in students’ perceptions of parental influence (Davis & Pampaka, 2008).
For the purposes of this study additional interviews with students from Cyprus were conducted in order to investigate their perceived parental aspirations for studies in HE in greater depth. A cross-cultural analysis in progress qualitatively compares cases in the two European countries, England and Cyprus. It is well documented that Cypriot parents have high educational expectations for their children and value education (Eliophotou, 1998; Symeou, 2007). Green and Vryonides (2005) point out that Greek Cypriot “parents consider it to be their duty to provide children with as much support for education as possible, expecting better life opportunities for them than themselves and perceived costs being overweighed by expectations of the future benefits of educational achievement” (p.328). The study aims to compare the cultural models (Gee, 1999) of the two samples and explore how they mediate parental aspirations.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Bourdieu, P. (1986). The forms of capital. In J.C. Richardson (ed), Handbook of theory and research for the sociology of education, New York: Greenwood Press. Bruner, J. (1996). The culture of education. Cambridge: Harvard University Press Davis, P. & Pampaka, M. (2008). University subject choice and discourses of parental influence: decision-making amongst AS Level mathematics students. Proceedings of Society for Research in Higher Education Conference, Liverpool: 9-11 December 2008 Eliophotou, M. (1998). Factors influencing the demand for higher education: The case of Cyprus. Higher Education, 35, 251-266 Elliot, J.G., Hufton, N., Illushin L. & Willis, W. (2001). “The Kids are Doing All Right”: differences in parental satisfaction, expectation and attribution in St Petersburgh, Sunderland and Kentucky. Cambridge Journal of Education, 31(2), 179-204 Gee, J.P. (1999). An introduction to discourse analysis: theory and method. London: Routledge. Green, A. & Vryonides, M. (2005). Ideological tensions in the educational choice practices of modern Greek Cypriot parents: the role of social capital, British Journal of Sociology of Education, 26(3), 327 - 342 Ma, X. (2001). Participation in Advanced Mathematics: Do expectation and influence of students, peers, teachers and parents matter? Contemporary Educational Psychology, 26, 132-146 Mau, W.C. (1997). Parental Influences on the High School Students’ Academic Achievement: A comparison of Asian immigrants, Asian Americans, and White Americans. Psychology in the Schools, 34(3), 267-277 Symeou. L. (2007). Cultural capital and family involvement in children’s education: tales from two primary schools in Cyprus, British Journal of Sociology of Education, 28(4), 473-487 Williams, J., Black, L., Davis, P., Hutcheson, G., Nicholson, S., & Wake, G. (2008). Keeping open the door to mathematically demanding programmes in further and higher education. Research briefing, June 2008. Available at: http://www.lta.education.manchester.ac.uk/TLRP/Research%20Briefing.pdf
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