A Correlational Study between the Parent and the Teacher's Self-Reported Assessments on the Child's Performance

Abstract

Parents, along with teachers, play crucial roles in the academic development of children. Studies in the developed countries have found that parental engagement in the children's education is an important predictor for children's academic success. However, less is studied about how parents in a developing country context could engage in their children's education. The recent ASER report 2018 states that the quality of school education has gone down although there is a significant improvement in the enrollment in the last 5 years. In such a case, what supplementary support can the parents provide for better academic outcomes of the children? It is also interesting to investigate how much do the parent and the teacher know about the child's subject knowledge. Are they on the same tangent? Secondly, do the parents who are better engaged make a better academic assessment of the child? We did a baseline study with 6 teachers and 22 parents whose children study in 6th standard in a Odia medium school in Khordha, Odisha. We compared the self-reported assessments by the parents and the teachers about the child's understanding of a particular subject through Likert-scale questionnaires. We also compared them with the actual test scores of the children obtained from the school. We found that there is a medium correlation between the assessment by the parents and that by the teachers. The correlation between the parent's subjective assessment and the child's actual test score was found to be poor. Surprisingly, we also found the same for teacher's subjective assessment and the child's actual test score. We discuss several qualitative insights for these results. Also, we provide potential design implications for better parental engagement in the developing country context.