Nurturing Cultures - A Cross-Cultural Perspective on the Intersection of Parenting and Teaching

Abstract

Every society invests enormous resources to ensure that children grow up with the skills, knowledge, and values that will enable them to be successful. Yet cultures vary in their beliefs about what effective parenting and teaching require. Nurturing children involves a collaboration among parents, teachers, and students and reflects cultural beliefs about how to best foster learning. This dissertation consists of three studies that used different methods to reveal cultural beliefs about teaching and learning. Study 1 used PISA parent survey and achievement data to examine whether there are cultural differences in the kinds of parental involvement in schooling that predict children’s success. We found important cross-national differences in the types of parental involvement that predicts academic success, suggesting that not all types of parental involvement are equally effective and its utility depends on the cultural context in which it occurs. We argue that these different patterns of effective parental involvement exist because school systems vary in what they expect of students, the ways in which they are open to parental participation, and the extent to which learning opportunities exist outside of schools. Study 2 used the same international dataset to cross-culturally compare students’ and parents’ perspectives on parental involvement in education and how these different perceptions relate to academic achievement. We found that the extent to which parent and child perceptions of parental support agree depends on both the type of parental involvement examined and the cultural context involved. Cross-national differences were particularly pronounced in one type of parental involvement – parental educational spending – suggesting that parental financial investment in education has different psychological and academic consequences for students in each cultural context. Study 3 used an experimental approach and a new paradigm to obtain real-time data on how college students experience and learn from various aspects of teaching. We examined how students process initial perceptions and/or judgments of teachers as well as learn from the teaching quality they receive. Our results suggest that overall quality of instruction, as well as the specific teaching strategies and behaviors included in a lesson have significant consequences on both student learning and evaluation of the instruction. And contrary to what past research suggests, first impressions that teachers make in the first few minutes of a class do not matter as much as the quality of the lesson that follows. Most importantly, the continuous data collection technique used in this study has the potential to identify ways of improving and/or reinforcing various aspects instructional strategies that could in turn change the way students learn from classroom lessons. By using such a wide range of methodological approaches, we were able to identify how different cultures organize the collaborative process of nurturing students into competent adults, and how students experience the education they receive. Taken together, the three studies examined the broader cultural context in which these nurturing efforts take place and how these different cultural models influence student learning. The results shed light on aspects of teaching and learning that are universal and also identify unique beliefs and practices that could be used to improve our own nurturing process in the U.S.