A parent’s level of education is often thought to be one of the strongest predictors of a student’s future success in college, but a new study upends much of this received wisdom.
Parents’ levels of education do not directly influence whether students demonstrate behaviors associated with deep learning, according to the study, “Exploring the Effect of Parental Education on College Students’ Deep Approaches to Learning,” by Amy K. Ribera, a research analyst for the Indiana University Center for Postsecondary Research. The study was scheduled to be presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association this past weekend, in San Francisco.
Though the overall differences were small, students whose parents earned baccalaureate degrees were the least likely to engage in deep learning. Not only did they lag behind those whose parents held advanced degrees, she found, but they also engaged in deep-learning behaviors less often than those whose parents had attended but not completed college, or who never went at all.
The data on freshmen that Ms. Ribera analyzed were collected as part of the Beginning College Student Survey of Student Engagement in the fall of 2008 and the National Survey of Student Engagement in the spring of 2009. Her data reflected the responses of more than 9,000 students at 80 institutions.
In particular, she examined data on what the engagement surveys refer to as “deep approaches to learning.” Some higher-education researchers say these approaches can reflect more accurately than grades or standardized tests the nature of teaching and learning that takes place in the classroom, and the level of academic expectation.
For her study, Ms. Ribera used a 12-item scale that asked students how often they applied knowledge to solve practical problems, integrated information from different sources outside class, and interrogated their existing views on a subject. These and other questions were intended to reflect the extent to which students engage in higher-order, integrative, and reflective learning.
Ms. Ribera analyzed those indicators of learning as they related to levels of parental education, which allowed students to be sorted into four groups: those with a parent who earned a graduate degree; those with a parent who earned a baccalaureate degree; those with a parent who had attended college but did not earn a four-year degree; or those with a parent who had never attended college.
She is sorting through possible explanations for her findings. Her optimistic side tells her that colleges’ efforts to help first-year students, particularly those from less-advantaged backgrounds, to adjust academically are bearing fruit, she wrote in an e-mail.
“My skeptical side thinks that I may have a measurement issue,” she wrote. Many students may not have understood the engagement survey’s terminology, she said, because it is full of jargon.
Liberal vs. Vocational
Students’ choices of major did seem to correlate with the kinds of approaches a student took to learning, Ms. Ribera found.
Students who planned to major in arts or science fields and who planned to attend graduate school tended to engage in deep approaches to learning more than those who chose vocationally oriented fields.
The disciplines would most likely not be driving the differences, she said, because the students she studied were still in their first year.
“My suspicion is that students who are concerned with securing a job tend to gravitate toward majors that are close to the market or have higher potential earnings,” she wrote. Prior studies have found that students who are extrinsically motivated, or whose interest in higher education is chiefly to acquire credentials for a job, will probably adopt surface approaches to learning, she added. Students who are intrinsically motivated tend to take a deep approach.
At the same time, parental education levels may still play a role, she noted. First-generation college students, or those whose parents attended but did not complete college, tend to see the financial return on tuition as a high priority; they may seek vocationally oriented disciplines more often than their peers.
“Nuance in the results suggests the picture is murky at best,” Ms. Ribera wrote in her study. “Perhaps it is less about the label and more about decisions and practices that students make while in college.”
