Intrusive Parental Homework Support and Children’s Math Achievement: Relation to Children’s Theories of Intelligence

• In Event: The Development of Children’s Understanding of Competence and Achievement

Abstract

Many parents help their children with homework, believing that this support will lead to positive motivational and academic outcomes for their children. However, research suggests that when parental homework involvement is uninvited, intrusive, and controlling, it impedes children’s psychological autonomy, motivation to do homework, perception of their own abilities, and eventually, their academic achievement. Despite the substantial attention to the negative impact of parents’ intrusive homework help on children’s motivation and achievement, it is not clear whether or how this effect depends on how children construe this help. Some children might interpret it as reflecting their own incompetence, while others might see it as a sign that their parents care about them. Consequently, these interpretations could alter the effect of unsolicited homework help on children’s performance. Drawing upon the literature on motivational theory, we hypothesized that children’s beliefs about the malleability of intelligence (theory of intelligence) moderate the negative link between parents’ intrusive homework support and children’s achievement. Specifically, we expected that parents’ intrusive homework support would hurt the performance of children who believe that their intelligence is fixed (entity theory), but not those who believe that their intelligence is malleable (incremental theory). We conducted two longitudinal studies, with elementary students (Study 1) and with middle and high school students (Study 2), to investigate whether the negative relation between parents’ intrusive homework support and achievement is moderated by children’s theories of intelligence. Children’s self-reported theories of intelligence, their report of parents’ intrusive homework support, and their math achievement were measured in the fall and again in the spring. To account for the stability of the constructs (parent intrusive homework support, theories of intelligence, and math achievement) and the bidirectional relations among them, we used autoregressive cross-lagged panel models (ARCLs). Results showed that for elementary as well as middle and high school students, parents’ intrusive homework support lowered children’s achievement in math, especially among those with an entity theory, but not those with an incremental theory. Further, when parents offered less homework support, children with an entity theory performed as well as those with an incremental theory; however, when there was more, children with an entity theory performed worse than those with an incremental theory. These findings replicate prior research suggesting that parental assistance with homework is negatively related to student academic motivation and achievement when it is developmentally inappropriate, controlling, intrusive, and accompanied by negative parental affect. Additionally, extending this line of research, this study, for the first time, shows that the negative relation of parents’ intrusive homework support and children’s math achievement depends on children’s theories of intelligence, and that this relation holds longitudinally even after accounting for prior scores on all measures. Our findings deliver an important message to parents and educators, suggesting that how children interpret unwanted assistance may be crucial to its effects on achievement longitudinally. Believing that abilities are malleable may lead to more benign appraisals of such intrusive support, whereas believing that abilities are fixed may lead to the opposite.

Authors

• Daeun Park, Sungkyunkwan University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Elizabeth A Gunderson, Temple University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Erin Maloney, University of Chicago
  Non-Presenting Author

• Eli Tsukayama, University of Hawaii, West O’ahu
  Non-Presenting Author

• Sian L. Beilock, Barnard college
  Non-Presenting Author

• Angela L. Duckworth, University of Pennsylvania
  Presenting Author

• Susan Cohen Levine, University of Chicago
  Non-Presenting Author