Parental expectation and involvement for their children's education in rural and urban China

Since the establishment of the Household Registration System (hukou system), mainland China has been divided into two separate societies, rural and urban, with sharply different socio-economic and educational rights and opportunities. For a long period, rural Chinese residents have experienced a comparatively low quality of education. Many studies have been conducted to identify the educational gaps from a school perspective between rural and urban regions, such as the quality of teaching and students’ academic achievement, rather than gaps from family aspects, such as parental involvement and stakeholders’ expectations. The aim of this study is to find out the characteristics of parental involvement and parents’ and students’ educational expectations, and how social-economic and cultural issues shape their involvement and expectations in the context of middle secondary school in mainland China.

An epistemological view of pragmatism was adopted to explore differences in, and issues impacting on, stakeholders’ expectations and parental involvement. An explanatory sequential mixed method, comprising two phases of data collection and analysis, was adopted as the research methodology. Epstein’s typology of parental involvement was used to identify and analyse activities of parental involvement. In the first phase, survey data from 461 parents (urban = 264, rural = 197) and 501 students (urban = 271, rural = 231) in grade eight from six schools (urban = 3, rural = 3) was used to identify differences in stakeholders’ expectations and parental involvement between rural and urban regions. The analysis, undertaken using SPSS 27, employed descriptive (mean, standard deviation, frequency, and percentage) and inferential (t-test and correlation) statistics to establish a general picture of the perceptions among rural and urban stakeholders about educational expectations and parental involvement. The second phase involved 24 interviews, including 12 students’ interviews and 12 parents’ interviews, for exploring detailed information about parental involvement and stakeholders’ expectations. Thematic data analysis was conducted and combined with quantitative data from the first phase, which provided a richly textured and complex picture of parental involvement and stakeholders’ expectations.

This study was the first to investigate characteristics of stakeholders’ expectations. The key findings were that although achieving degrees of tertiary education and respecting children’s own choices had a consensus among rural and urban stakeholders, urban stakeholders tended to have higher expectations, such as master's or Ph.D. degrees, and to devise more detailed plans for achieving these goals, compared to their rural counterparts. Secondly, the findings related to parental involvement indicated that urban parents tended to establish two-way communication with schoolteachers, pay more attention to assisting their children’s learning at home, ask about their children’s daily life in school, and send their children to tutoring classes. In contrast, rural parents seemed to have one-way communication with schoolteachers, less intervention in their children’s school learning, encouraged children’s learning without detailed suggestions, and had divided opinions about the efficiency of tutoring classes. Thirdly, three issues emerged from findings that shaped involvement and expectations: the importance of knowledge about education; the social gap that raised the issue of an urban-rural dualistic social structure; and the influences of Confucian ideology and western culture. The significance of this study is that it has systematically compared and contrasted parental involvement and stakeholders’ expectations in rural and urban settings within the broader social and historical context of mainland China.