Parental Aspirations for Their Children's Upper Secondary Education from the Perspective of Pupils at the End of Elementary Education

Abstract

Parental upper secondary educational aspirations are the ambitions and goals that parents have for their children's upper secondary education. In the Croatian context, they have not been researched so far, despite contributing significantly to pupils' aspirations and school success and being a predictor of parental involvement in children's education. This paper aims to research the nature and determinants of parental upper secondary educational aspirations from the perspective of pupils and describe the patterns of communication and interaction between parents and children related to aspirations and the transition from elementary to upper secondary school. Parental upper secondary educational aspirations were examined from the pupils' perspective by a mixed-model study involving a survey of 1,031 8th-grade pupils from elementary schools in Zagreb and semi-structured interviews with 29 pupils at the end of the first semester of the 8th grade. The quantitative part of the research indicates that pupils' expected school achievement and parental educational status were significant predictors of parental upper secondary educational aspirations, while the effect of pupils' gender was not significant. The qualitative part of the research points to a congruence between pupils' and parental aspirations and the substantial involvement of parents in the process of selection of upper secondary educational options. In families where parents have different educational statuses, the patterns of communication and interaction regarding aspirations and upper secondary school choice varied to some extent and were related to different valuation of grammar schools and vocational education in these families.