What should we tell parents about assessments?
Harnessing the motivating behaviours of parents
Parents have a right to know how their child is doing at school and to have the opportunity to influence their success. For this reason, schools must share some of the assessment information they hold and inform parents about how they know how well their child is doing. However, in addition to respecting these rights, schools will want to harness parental involvement to improve learning. Research suggests that parental involvement can have a small to moderate effect on academic achievement.1
Broadly, there are two types of parental behaviours that schools may hope to influence: motivating behaviours and controlling behaviours.2 Motivating behaviours are those which affect a student’s intrinsic motivation, including promoting a positive academic identity, raising expectations and ambitions, and supporting the development of self-regulatory behaviours. These have indirect effects on student behaviour by promoting self-regulation.3 Controlling behaviours, on the other hand, intend to directly affect desirable learning behaviours such as time spent studying, the methods of study, and the quality of outcome.
Teachers often seek to engage parents in exercising controlling behaviours, for example by encouraging them to supervise study and check that homework has been completed to a satisfactory standard. However, a meta-analysis of the evidence found that parental supervision has relatively weak effects over time on student achievement, whereas motivating behaviours such as communicating high expectations regarding achievement and aspirations have relatively strong effects.4
Teachers and schools must make decisions about what to tell parents in advance of assessments taking place and what to tell them about their child’s performance in assessments. These decisions should be influenced by a consideration of both what parents have a right to know and what effect this will have on their motivating and controlling behaviours.
What parents want to know
Parents differ significantly in their desire to be involved in their child’s education, so generalisations are necessary. For convenience, we will imagine a ‘typical parent’ who wants their child to do well at school and is prepared to make some effort to influence this.
Parents will likely want to know when important assessments will take place, such as mock exams, class tests, or assessments that will contribute towards qualification grades, where the stakes are higher. They will also want to know what is expected of students in preparing for these assessments: how long they should spend studying, what content to focus on, and how to study effectively. This information satisfies the controlling tendency of parents. There is a risk that attempts to exercise control may backfire, leading to conflict or lower effort by students as they resist parental control. However, it is hard to deny parents information about important assessments and schools should seek to mitigate excessive controlling tendencies by educating parents about how best to support their children in the run up to high stakes assessments.
Once assessments have taken place, parents will want to know how well their child did. ‘How well’ requires a comparison to either:
The performance of other students in the class or cohort;
What the student was expected to achieve in this assessment;
What progress has been made since previous assessments; or,
What the student might achieve in a future, terminal assessment.
Simply sharing assessment data without context or comparator will be unlikely to satisfy most parents as it contains no information, no meaning. To understand what assessment data means to parents, and therefore how it will affect their behaviour, we must consider how assessment data affects parents’ beliefs about their children.
Assessment and parental beliefs
Parents will hold two beliefs relevant to their child’s education. First, they will have a belief about their child’s educational abilities which has been influenced by past educational success. This will likely be specific to subjects, for example, a parent may believe their child to be ‘good at maths’. Second, they will have a belief about what their child may go on to do in the future, whether academically or in terms of future careers available to them.
These beliefs can be in harmony or conflict. For example, a parent may believe that their child isn’t very good at chemistry but is assured that they are doing well in the subjects they need to access a range of higher education routes in the arts and humanities. Alternatively, a parent whose child is struggling in chemistry who aspires for medical school will be conflicted. The former parent will be more likely to exhibit motivating behaviours, such as saying to their child that they could be good at chemistry if they work at it. The latter may tend towards controlling behaviours such as employing a private tutor, dictating study routines, and speaking directly to the class teacher.
What might happen when we introduce assessment information into this mix? First, giving advance notice of assessments will likely trigger the controlling behaviours of conflicted parents. Teachers should consider carefully what information they provide parents with about what students are expected to do to prepare for the assessment (perhaps setting lower and upper limits to the amount of time spent preparing). Second, when we share assessment results, we will either confirm or contradict parents’ existing beliefs. For conflicted parents, confirmatory assessment results showing that their child is still performing below expectations will be a signal that more controlling behaviours are needed.
Teachers cannot be expected to know how the parents of every child they teach will respond to assessments (although they soon work out who the ‘pushy parents’ are when they meet at parents’ evening). However, understanding the range of responses by parents can help teachers in deciding what, how much, and how often, to share assessment information.
This brief critique of how schools might share assessment results shows that there are no easy answers. It is no wonder that schools fall back on broad statements or indicative grades which parents ‘understand’, but which have little inherent meaning.
Perhaps we should be steered more by what behaviours we hope to activate in parents. As with students, we want parents to believe that the harder students work and the more they adopt effective study habits, the better they will do. Providing regular evidence that hard work pays off may be our best bet. This suggests that sharing frequent, low-stakes assessment results may be better than only sharing high stakes, comparative results and that we should provide notice to parents and information about what students should do to maximise their chance of success. By providing tight feedback loops which tie effort to success, we may hope to nudge parents towards motivating behaviours in the long term whereby they promote the belief that their child is good at the subject and can do well. Parents’ role in the assessment system might therefore be to help their child believe that they have agency to influence their performance. The information we provide should help them do this.
Parental Involvement and Students' Academic Achievement: A Meta-Analysis - The findings reveal a small to moderate, and practically meaningful, relationship between parental involvement and academic achievement. Parental aspiration/expectation for children's education achievement has the strongest relationship, whereas parental home supervision has the weakest relationship.
The How, Whom, and Why of Parents’ Involvement in Children’s Academic Lives: More Is Not Always Better - how parents become involved determines in large part the success of their involvement.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.3102/003465430305567
Parents' Involvement in Children's Schooling: A Multidimensional Conceptualization and Motivational Model – parents have indirect effects on motivation through perceived competence and control understanding
https://srcd.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1467-8624.1994.tb00747.x
Why does parents' involvement enhance children's achievement? The role of parent-oriented motivation – says that the more parents are involved, the more self-regulated pupils become.
Parental involvement and academic performance: Less control and more communication -Students whose parents exhibited a more distal or indirect profile of family involvement tended to demonstrate better results than those from homes with a more controlling style.
https://digibuo.uniovi.es/dspace/bitstream/handle/10651/45250/Parental.pdf?sequ