The Effects of Perceived Parental Expectations on Chinese Children's Mathematics Performance

The influence of perceived parental expectations on children's school perfor mance was examined. Sixty-four Chinese children from two elementary schools in Hong Kong participated. Subjects completed a questionnaire on their parents' expectations of their school performance. They later took an arithmetic test un der the condition of anticipating either parental evaluation or peer evaluation of their test scores. When children anticipated that their parents would evaluate their performance, performance was better for those who perceived their par ents as having higher expectations of them, and worse for those with lower per ceived parental expectations. In contrast, performance in the peer evaluation condition was unrelated to perceived parental expectations. Parental expectations are one of the many extracurricular factors that might influence children's academic performance (Bloom, 1976; Smith, 1969). Indeed, correlational studies have often found relation ships between parental expectations and children's school perfo