Parental Aspiration

The journal article “ Don’t Aim Too High for Your Kids: Parental Overaspiration Undermines Students’ Learning in Mathematics” was written by Kou Murayama, Reinheard Pekrun, Masayuki Suzuki, and Herbert W. Marsh. Nowadays, parents have high expectation and aspiration on their children as they hope that the children can perform well in school. This article aimed to investigate the effect of the aspiration of parents on their children’s academic achievement. Throughout this article, the main argument stated by the authors was that high parental aspiration resulted in negative reciprocal effect in children’s academic achievement. In general, the authors conducted a precise and detailed research which written in a well-organized report. The authors

The authors provided useful premises which seemed to be convincing to the readers. They stated that unrealistic expectation and overaspiration of parents on their children will be detrimental for children’s academic achievement, in view of the fact that parents show immoderate parental control and involvement result in negative impact of children’s emotion such as anxiety and frustration. Hence, parents who simply raised the aspiration towards their children’s academic achievement cannot be an effective way to improve children’s engagement in their academic fields. In addition, the authors also did a great job by showing precision on important terms and words, which helped in their consistency in argument. They gave clear definition of “parental expectation” and “parental aspiration” in the article. It is very important for the readers to distinguish between the two terms as it is the key to understand the purpose and conclusion of the article. Also, the authors also presented reliable result from the research which is one of the strong evidence in this article. From the result, it showed that parental aspiration caused an increase percentage of Mathematics achievement in children, but parental overaspiration caused slight decrease over time in children’s Mathematics results.The authors used this as a strong evidence to support their argument, which is the overaspiration of parents lead

They collected a large-scale of sample of parents and children from Germany in the research. After that, they analyzed the data by applying the advanced quantitative methodology, which is the bi-variate dual-change score model. Factors such as age, gender, school type, intelligence, and family socioeconomic status (SES) and others were taking into consideration while analyzing the data. It is a good practice for repeating the experiment on the families in United States as it increased the robustness of the results. Additionally, the authors conducted robustness check by doing traditional cross-lagged model to prove that their results did not depend on particular model. Hence, the the result was mostly reliable as they started with an appropriate method to conduct the research and detail analysis of the