10. Parents’ views of their children’s course choices and NCEA experiences

We asked parents a number of questions about their children’s choice of courses, and how their child was responding to the NCEA. We also asked questions to see how parents understood the new choices and challenges of the NCEA regime.

The 2006 NZCER National Survey of Secondary Schools found considerable uncertainty amongst parents concerning various aspects of NCEA, with around half of the responding group saying they did not understand the changes (Hipkins, 2007). This is concerning because parents are (or could be) in the frontline when it comes to supporting students as they study in the senior secondary school. The sense they make of ways they can do that is of interest to us here. For example, parents will often provide support, or ask for change, if they perceive that the school is putting too much pressure on their child. One of the criticisms of NCEA is that the constant assessment makes it difficult for students to meet all the demands placed on them. Stressed students are likely to communicate this to their parents, either directly or indirectly, so this was an issue we explored.

Parents will have their own perspectives on motivation issues in relation to NCEA and these have not been described in the context of specific students’ actual learning progress in any other research that we are aware of. The Competent Learner parent interviews afforded an opportunity to explore this complex issue for the first time.

This chapter addresses the following questions:

• Do parents’ perceptions of the influences on their child’s subject choices match those of the students?
• How do parents understand their own child’s motivation in relation to NCEA choices and study patterns?
• What are parents’ views of the ways students are managing any assessment pressures?
• How do parents’ views align with their own child’s achievement record?

Parents’ view of students’ subject choices

We asked parents what they thought was important when deciding what subjects or subject options their child would take. The next table shows the frequency with which each item was selected. In cases where the wording was the same, or substantially so, the table compares parents’ responses with the students’ perceptions of influences on their choices. A quarter of the parents (26 percent) selected one influence, 34 percent selected two influences, 20 percent selected three, and another 20 percent selected more than three different influences on subject choices.

Where the parent and student lists overlapped there is remarkable agreement between the two sets of responses. Career and personal interest were conflated in the student survey, but were separate items in the parent survey. This doubtless accounts for the difference here. Personal interest was the influence most frequently selected by both parents and students. And again, as for the students themselves, we see that the prospect of gaining “easy NCEA credits” is seldom seen by parents as an influence on subject choices, though taking a subject which was not thought to be too demanding was thought to influence some subject choices.

Table 73: A comparison of parent and student perceptions of subject-choice influences

Factors influencing decision	% mentioning this factor - Students (n = 421)	% mentioning this factor - Parents (n = 403)
Students’ own interests	82	73
Leads to career	–	43
Took subjects that continued on from last year	29	29
Took easy subjects/student could cope	23	23
Leads to next year’s options	–	19
Leads to tertiary qualification	–	16
Discussion with friends	8	4
Had no real choice/had to prioritise	7	6
Information from school, e.g. course booklet	4	1
Teacher reputation	3	6
The options available	–	6
Advice from others familiar with school	–	4
Prospect of easy NCEA credits	2	3
Fitted timetable	–	3

Note: 

Cells marked — represent items in the parent survey but not in the student survey.

Given the considerable lengths to which schools go to provide subject choice advice it is interesting that 57 percent of parents said they had not talked to anyone at the school about subject options.³² However, most of the parents who had talked to the school said the advice was helpful (84 percent of this subgroup).

Thirty-two percent of parents said their child was taking a subject they would like to change or had changed during the year. This is very close to the 27 percent of students who were not happy with their choices and said they needed more guidance. Reasons for wanting a change mostly centred around the difficulty of the work (12 percent) and the student not succeeding (5 percent). Poor teaching was cited by 10 percent of parents, compared to just 3 percent of students. It may be that students do not feel empowered to ask for changes on these grounds, while their parents are on the receiving end of any discontent. (In a different question, 40 percent of parents said their child talked to them about teachers.)

Nine percent of students said they were now more aware of what they wanted to do, which is similar to the 5 percent of parents who cited the need to change to a subject that would lead to the tertiary course to which their child now aspired.

Parents’ views of NCEA assessment methods

We asked parents if they thought that the NCEA way of assessing is better than the former system. Their responses, shown in the next table, are divided between agreeing that NCEA is better and either disagreeing or not being sure.

Table 74: Parents’ views about whether NCEA is a better method of assessment

Response	% (n = 403)
Yes	49
No	24
Not sure/depends	24
Don’t know former system	2
Child not doing NCEA	1

As in other research NZCER has recently conducted there is considerable uncertainty among parents as to whether NCEA is a “good thing” or not (Hipkins, 2007). This is not surprising in view of the different premises that underpin a standards-based assessment system, compared to a traditional norm-referenced, examination-based system. Other research has highlighted the very different ideological positions that can, either tacitly or explicitly, inform very different views of NCEA (Dobric, 2006). What sorts of factors might have influenced the divided views of these parents? We asked them to give reasons for their responses to the general question about the value of NCEA assessment, and the next table compares positive and negative aspects of their reasoning. The items on the table have been juxtaposed to highlight that what is seen as positive by some may be seen as negative by others.

Table 75: Parents’ reasons for their opinions about whether NCEA is a better way of assessing (n = 403)

Positive reasons	%	Negative reasons	%
Able to see progress and accumulate credits across year	48	Too much assessment and not enough teaching	6
Gives more chance to succeed	26	Doesn’t reward effort	11
Improves work and study habits	18	Higher workload	3
More challenging	6	Less demanding, challenging, motivating	18
		Hard to know how to improve grades	11
		Course fragmentation	8
		Different standards at different schools	4

Interestingly, for all but one reason (whether NCEA is more or less challenging) support for the positive version outweighs support for the negative version of a reason. There are, however, more negative types of reasons overall, especially when the responses in the “other” category are taken into account (36 percent of parents gave “other” responses). Most frequent of these was that percentages provide a better gauge of ability (9 percent). This view is likely to relate to the familiarity of norm-referenced judgements, where students are distributed along a Bell Curve of achievement, and assessment marks are adjusted as necessary to obtain the required distribution. As we have noted elsewhere:

It has been difficult for students, parents, and the public to shift from the seeming objectivity of percentage scores that allowed easy comparison between students, to a situation where students pit themselves against a standard. The meaning of assessment results seems less clear to people, even though actual learning outcomes are reported in some detail. Arguably this aspect of the NCEA needed to be more carefully explained, since it represents such a break from the shared experience of so many people. (Hipkins, Wylie, & Hodgen, 2007, p. 6)

As we saw in Chapter 3, students’ collated NCEA data do correlate quite strongly with the Competent Learners study measures of competencies Thus it is clear to us that NCEA does provide an informative account of a student’s overall achievement. At issue is how easy it is to glean a sense of this from the separate pieces of achievement data.

Some parents worried that marking could be subjective, ambiguous, unfair, or in error (5 percent), with a related concern that teachers might not be objective or competent to judge (1 percent). Five percent of parents were concerned about bad publicity, and wondered if this would impact on employers’ acceptance of NCEA, while 1 percent said it was good for employers and easy to understand. Two percent thought NCEA is better for girls than for boys. Seven percent of parents reiterated that they did not understand the system and so did not know how to answer.

Parents’ support for NCEA and differing student learning needs

We anticipated that differences of parental opinion might be attributed to the specific learning needs of their own child. Are parents of less academically inclined students more likely to say it gives their child a chance to succeed, and those whose child has always been a successful learner to say it doesn’t reward effort? To address this question we cross-tabulated the parents’ responses with the attitudinal and cognitive competencies of their children, with the child’s subject cluster, and with maternal qualification levels, which is the social characteristic most closely associated with young people’s competency levels. Overall views about the value of NCEA or concerns that it was less motivating or demanding were unrelated to student competency levels or subject clusters.

As anticipated, there was a trend for parents whose child was in the lowest quartile for cognitive competencies to be more likely to agree that NCEA is a better way of assessing learning and for those whose child was in the highest quartile to be more likely to disagree. However, those from families where the mother had no qualification were the least likely to select “being able to see progress as you go/accumulate credits better than one final exam” as a reason that NCEA is a better way of assessing.

Parents of students in the highest attitudinal and competency quartiles were the least likely to say the NCEA provides more chances to succeed, and the most likely to say it doesn’t reward effort. Along with parents of students in the third competency quartile, they were also the most likely to say it is hard to know how to improve grades with NCEA. Parents from families where the mother had a university degree were the most likely to say NCEA doesn’t reward effort, to express concerns about course fragmentation and to think there was “too much assessment—not enough teaching” with NCEA.

There has been considerable discussion in the media about whether NCEA disadvantages boys. This seems to turn around two main assumptions: boys are more motivated by competition, and boys prefer one concerted effort at examination time because they are not as organised to pace themselves for continuous study. In this Competent Learners study, there was a trend for female parents to be more likely to agree that the NCEA way of assessing is better and for male parents to say “not sure/it depends”. Congruent with the media arguments, parents of girls were more likely to agree that NCEA improved their daughter’s work and study habits. There was a trend for them to also agree more often that an advantage of NCEA was “being able to see progress as you go/accumulate credits better than one final exam”. There was a trend for responding male parents to be more likely than female parents to think the NCEA is less “demanding/ challenging/motivating”. We checked whether female students were more likely to be represented by female parents and vice versa, but this was not the case.

Parents of students in the “traditional arts” subject cluster were more likely to say it was hard to know how to help their child improve their grades or that NCEA did not reward effort, while those with a child in the “traditional science” subject cluster were more likely to say it had improved their child’s work and study habits.

It will be interesting to see if the recently announced changes allowing for the awarding of NCEA with merit or excellence will be seen by parents of higher achieving students as addressing their concerns about recognition for effort; this change does not address the concern about fragmentation of learning. Hipkins (2007) discusses perceptions of curriculum and over-assessment issues in more detail.

Parents’ views of their child’s motivation

The above discussion draws attention to views about the motivational aspects of the NCEA. Assessment for qualifications has long been used to motivate students in the senior secondary school, so this issue is not new, but some aspects of the NCEA have altered the ways it plays out in schools. Parents were asked to respond to a few Likert-scaled statements about the factors that motivated their child’s NCEA decision making.

We also asked parents whether their child was generally positive about the NCEA. Sixty-nine percent said they were; 19 percent expressed a neutral view; and only 11 percent said their child was not generally positive about the NCEA.

As might be expected, parents whose personal view was that NCEA is not a better way of assessing were also more likely to disagree or strongly disagree that their child was generally positive about NCEA. Family attitudes tend to be shared. There was a trend for more parents of girls, and for female parents, to totally agree their child was always positive about NCEA, while parents of boys, and male parents, tended to select the less emphatic “agree” response.

The role of credits

We drew on the most common motivation-related criticisms of NCEA when shaping the statements in the next figure. In the responses we see that around two-fifths of the parents (41 percent) were of the view that their child would do the bare minimum necessary to gain credits. This is a more pessimistic view than that held by teachers (28 percent). A third of the parents (32 percent) thought their child would attempt credits that were seen to be easy to get. But only around a fifth of the parents thought their child was not interested in study for which no credits could be gained.

Figure 10: Parents’ views of the role of NCEA credits in their child’s work

 

Again we found that these differences of opinion were linked to the different learning needs of each parent’s child. Parents whose child was in the lowest quartile for the cognitive or attitudinal competencies were more likely than all other parents to agree or totally agree their child would do the bare minimum to gain credits, that they were not interested in the work if there were no credits to be gained, and that they would try for credits that are easy to get.

Parents whose child was in the “contextually oriented” subject cluster were more likely to agree or totally agree the child did the bare minimum to get credits. Along with parents of students in the “vocational” cluster, they were more likely to agree their child was not interested in work if there were no credits to be gained, and that they attempted credits that were easy to get.

The same picture emerged in relation to maternal qualification levels. Parents from families where the mother had a university qualification were the most likely to disagree or totally disagree that their child would attempt credits that were easy to get, and along with those from families where the mother’s highest qualification was at the tertiary level, were the most likely to disagree or totally disagree that their child did the bare minimum to gain credits.

Here the gender difference also comes into view more sharply. Parents of boys were more likely to agree or totally agree that their child did the bare minimum to gain credits, that they were not interested in work where there were no credits to be gained, and there was a trend for them to agree that their son went for credits that were easy to get.

Making an effort

Just over half the parents thought their child would work hard regardless of whether a topic was being assessed or not, and 42 percent thought their child always strove for excellence.

Parents whose child was in either of the highest two quartiles for attitudinal competencies were more likely to agree that their child would work hard whether the topic was assessed or not, and that they always strove for excellence. Parents who strongly agreed with both these statements were more likely to have a child in the highest attitudinal quartile. The association with the statement “always strives for excellence” also held for being in the highest quartile for the cognitive competency but there was no significant association for “works hard whether the topic is assessed or not”.

Parents of students in the “traditional arts” cluster were more likely to agree or totally agree that their child always strives for excellence, and that they would work hard whether the topic was assessed or not. Parents of students in the “traditional science” cluster were more likely to agree with this statement.

As might be anticipated from the responses outlined above, parents of boys were more likely to be neutral, or to disagree or totally disagree that their son would work hard whether the topic was assessed or not, or that he would always strive for excellence.

Again, it will be interesting to see if recently announced changes, allowing for the award of an “NCEA with excellence” or an “NCEA with merit” can influence the 30 percent who are not seen by their parents as currently striving for excellence for its own sake.

Parents’ views of NCEA-related work pressure

Given commentary in the media about endless assessment pressures on students since the inception of the NCEA, we were somewhat surprised to find that 81 percent of parents did not think the NCEA had caused more stress than expected at assessment time. Just 12 percent said it did, and another 5 percent said the stress level varied.

As the next figure shows, just 6 percent of parents saw their child as not coping with internal assessment pressures. This number increased to 12 percent, which is still a low level of concern, in relation to external end-of-year assessments. Somewhat more parents (23 percent) saw their child as not well organised and prepared for coping with the ongoing flow of assessments.

Figure 11: Parents’ views of students’ ability to cope with assessment pressures

 

It is interesting that a lot more parents were unsure about the pressure of externals, or about the extent of their child’s organisation and preparation than were unsure about coping with internal assessments. Since these happen one at a time, and throughout the year, it may be that they are more likely to be a subject of conversation at home. Supporting this suggestion, the most common item of school-related conversation between a parent and child was the work done at school, including actual achievements and assessment (54 percent of parents said they talked about this). Next most common topics were social activity and friends (46 percent), followed by teachers (40 percent).

Performance-related patterns were similar to those reported in relation to attitudes to credits and working hard regardless of whether something was to be assessed or not. Parents of students in the highest quartile for both cognitive and attitudinal competencies were more likely to totally agree their child was well organised and prepared for assessments, and that they could cope with the pressure of both internal and external assessments. Parents of those in the lowest attitudinal and cognitive competency quartiles were more likely to disagree or totally disagree that their child was well organised and prepared for assessments. They were also more likely to simply agree or to be neutral on the question of whether their child could cope with the pressure of internal assessments and to be neutral (and in the case of cognitive competencies to disagree) that they could cope with the pressure of external assessments.

Parents of students in the “traditional arts” subject cluster were more likely to totally agree, or along with parents in the “traditional science” cluster, to agree, that their child was well organised and prepared for assessments. This was also true of parents from homes where the mother had a university qualification. “Traditional arts” cluster students’ parents were also more likely to agree or totally agree that their child could cope with the pressure of external assessments.

Some gender differences were apparent. Parents of girls were more likely to agree or totally agree that their daughter was organised and well prepared for assessments, and to totally agree that they could cope with the pressure of internal assessments. (Parents of boys were more likely to just “agree” with this.) The flipside of this is more girls may be getting more stressed than expected around internal assessments—17 percent of girls’ parents compared to 8 percent of boys’ parents thought this. There were no gender-related differences in response to the item about coping with the pressure of external assessments.

Skipping assessments as a coping strategy

Very few students said they had skipped assessments. The picture from their parents is somewhat different. Twenty-one percent of parents said they were aware of their child skipping NCEA assessments, and in half these cases (11 percent) they had discussed this in advance, suggesting it was a considered choice.

Just as the students said they skipped because they didn’t expect to pass, more parents gave this as a reason than any other, albeit just 3 percent said this. Two percent said the student had skipped because they didn’t need the credits. This is hardly suggestive of the widespread practice some critics of NCEA have suggested. Other reasons, given by either 1 or 2 percent of parents included: leaving study too late; being in poor health; clash with an event such as a sports trip; family away; not wanting to do the task (e.g. public speaking); timetable mix-up; and prioritising to manage time.

Parents of students in the highest quartile for attitudinal competencies were more likely to say they were not aware of their child skipping any assessments and those in the lowest quartile to be more likely to say they were aware their child had done this. There was a trend for the latter group to also say they had not been aware in advance that their child was planning to do this—suggesting that for some students in the lowest attitudinal quartile it was more likely to be a spontaneous decision than a planned one. There was a trend for parents of boys to be more likely to say that their son had not discussed a decision to skip in advance of doing so.

There was a trend for parents from families where the mother had a university qualification to say they were not aware of their child skipping any assessments.

Patterns of opinion about NCEA

How were the parents’ responses to each of the questions about NCEA inter-related? There were patterns of relatively strong associations between some of the responses, most notably:

• A parent reporting that a student always strove for excellence was likely to also report that the student worked hard whether the topic was assessed or not, was organised and well-prepared for assessments, and that they did not do the bare minimum to get credits, or show lack of interest in work if no credits were to be gained. In fact, the responses to all of these questions were moderately to strongly inter-related. This would suggest that intrinsic motivation is not negatively affected by the NCEA.
• A student perceived to be able to cope with the pressure of internal assessments was also likely to be perceived to be able to cope with external assessments. However, there was no relationship between being able to cope with pressure (or not) and going for credits that were easy to get, and only weak associations with all the other questions we asked parents about their child’s approach to the NCEA.
• Parents who perceived their child went for credits that were easy to get were slightly more likely to report that they also did a minimal amount of work, working only if credits were to be gained, and were not organised and well prepared for assessments. However, there was no association with how positive the child felt about NCEA.
• How positive the young person was perceived to feel about NCEA was not associated with any of the other responses.

These patterns taken together suggest that NCEA itself is not a strong factor in how students are motivated, or how they respond to external assessment on the day: that pressure may still be felt even when decisions have been made to take the easiest route to gain credits.

How parents see their supporting role

We asked parents about the roles they could play in supporting their child with NCEA assessment tasks. The next table shows that general encouragement is the main form of support, followed by supervision of study. Neither of these, or specific coaching (10 percent) is new to NCEA. Parents who know how to, and are inclined to do so, have always provided this type of assessment support to their children.

Table 76: Nature of assessment support provided by parents

Type of support	% (n = 403)
General encouragement	78
Monitor assessments to support time management/study	48
Provide specific coaching/revision	10
Advocate for student	7
Other	9

The main response in the “other” category was NCEA-related. Seven percent of parents said one form of support is to try to keep up with NCEA changes and to understand the system.

Keeping track of progress

It was an explicit intention of the NCEA that the assessment data generated would be more informative about students’ actual achievements than the traditional single mark percentage total. As we have already seen, some parents still have more faith in the more familiar percentage mark, and 2 percent reiterated that view when responding to the question that follows.

What sense do parents of students in Years 12 or 13 make of their child’s NZQA-generated Record of Learning (RoL)? Just 35 percent of parents said the RoL made sense to them and the student. Many did not answer this question (36 percent) and some had mixed views (12 percent) but 18 percent said no, the RoL did not make sense to them. The main reason was that it was complex and hard to understand (32 percent). Twelve percent of parents wanted the RoL to record what the student had failed—a change that was among those recently announced. Three percent said they had found inconsistencies in marking or results. On the other hand, 3 percent of parents volunteered that it was easy to understand and showed what their child had achieved, and another 2 percent said that, with older students in the family, they knew what to expect.

There are indications that parents’ responses here are aligned with their child’s overall performance and with their own experiences of the education system. Parents of students in the highest attitudinal and cognitive competencies quartiles, those from families where the mother had a university qualification, and those from high- and very high-income families were more likely to say the RoL did make sense to them. Those parents of students in the lowest quartiles for both sets of competencies, and those from families where the mother had no qualification were more likely to say it did not.

Is NCEA a “lightning rod” for concerns about progress?

There were interesting indications in the 2006 NZCER National Survey of Secondary Schools that NCEA might be acting as something of a “lightning rod” for both parents and teachers who are disaffected with some other aspect of education (Hipkins, 2007). Looking to see if we could find a similar effect in the Competent Learner research, we cross-tabulated parents’ NCEA responses with a question that asked “Are you satisfied with your child’s progress?”

Fifty-nine percent of parents said they were satisfied with their child’s progress, much the same as when the students were in Year 10, but a little lower than the 69 percent who expressed satisfaction at Year 9. Twenty-two percent of the parents said their satisfaction with their child’s progress was mixed; and 19 percent were not satisfied.

As we anticipated, parents who said they were satisfied with progress were also more likely to say they thought the “NCEA way of assessing is better for learning”. They were also more likely to say this was because they could see the child’s progress as they went along, or that it improved work and study habits. Congruent with this, parents who were happy with progress were more likely to say that their child’s NZQA-generated RoL made sense to them.

However, it is important to bear in mind that 19 percent of parents who were happy about progress did not think NCEA was better for learning, and 14 percent, that it did not reward effort.

Every one of the Likert-scale items asking parents about NCEA was correlated with responses to the satisfaction statement. Parents who said they were not happy with their child’s progress were more likely to agree or totally agree that their child:

• did the bare minimum to get NCEA credits
• was not interested in the work if there were no credits to be gained
• went after credits that were easy to get.

By contrast, parents who said they were happy with their child’s progress were more likely to agree or totally agree that their child:

• would work hard whether assessed or not
• always strove for excellence
• was organised and well prepared for assessments
• could cope with the pressure of external assessments (and to totally agree they could do so for internal assessments)
• was generally positive about NCEA.

Parents in this group were also more likely to say they were not aware of their child skipping any assessments.

Collectively these results point to a pattern where involvement and being “in touch” with their child’s learning was associated with an understanding and acceptance of NCEA. This lends support to but does not, of itself, confirm our “lightning rod” hypothesis. In our recent report on views of the NCEA drawn from the 2006 NZCER National Survey of Secondary Schools (Hipkins, 2007) parent worries about achievement are also correlated with negative views about factors that ostensibly have less to do with achievement per se, and more to do with aspects of NCEA such as its acceptance in the wider community and its perceived impact on curriculum.

These findings are a timely reminder that attitudes are shaped by perceptions at least as much as by actualities. For example, blaming NCEA for motivation challenges is not substantiated by the data presented in this report overall (see also Hipkins et al., 2007). Rather, motivation at the time students undertake secondary school qualification assessments is likely to be associated with competency levels and previous motivation levels; that is, with the learning and assessment identity of the individual (Ecclestone & Pryor, 2003), as this is shaped and evolves over time.

Implications

Although few parents thought their child was negative about the NCEA, the parents of our sample were divided about the value of NCEA. The big plus of NCEA was being able to see progress over the year, and have more opportunity to succeed; on the negative side, parents were concerned that it was less challenging, and less coherent (than the former “one size fits all” qualification).

Though parent views about the NCEA were mixed, most parents thought that their children were positive about it. Their views were mixed as to whether their child was interested in work that was unrelated to credits, and did the minimum required to get the credits (as they might have done in the previous qualification regime); or whether they would work hard regardless of whether a topic was being assessed and always strive for excellence. All but a small proportion of the parents thought their children coped with assessment pressures, both internal and external. Just over half also thought their child was organised and well prepared for assessments. Parents’ views did not indicate that student levels of intrinsic motivation toward their work were negatively affected.

Some of the difference in parent views of the NCEA was related to how satisfied the parents were with their child’s school progress. Parents who were satisfied with their child’s progress were more likely to have positive views about the NCEA

The patterns of views here do indicate the importance of giving parents more information about the NCEA; they also suggest that views about the NCEA may be formed by things that are not to do with the structure per se of the new qualification.

Parent perspectives on the roles that credits play in relation to student effort give a mixed picture. It is somewhat different from the picture we get from students and teachers, but we also asked parents somewhat different questions. It would be good to understand more about the role of credits in relation to the kind of effort made, and the kind of learning that results, within the context of thinking about the role of credits in course and qualification structures.