Parents’ and teachers’ responsibility assignments for Chinese primary school children’s education

Thesis

To build a supportive learning environment for children, healthy and cooperative relationships between parents and teachers can be built through understanding each other’s roles and responsibilities. Effective home-school collaborations may be contingent on a sense of shared responsibility between parents and teachers. However, current understandings of obligations in children’s education remain implicit and ill-defined. In this exploratory study, responsibility assignments between parents and teachers for Chinese early primary school children’s education were investigated.

A mixed design study was conducted. First, twelve individual semi-structured interviews were conducted with Chinese parents and teachers of children in grade one through three. Thematic analysis revealed five responsibility themes: 1) communication between parents and teachers; 2) help with children’s learning; 3) help with children’s behaviour and socialemotional wellbeing; 4) awareness towards children’s development; 5) encouraging the holistic development of children. Although both groups shared the opinion that cooperation between two groups is essential, some discrepancies in the assignment of responsibility were identified. The second part of the study contained a quantitative survey developed with the results from the qualitative interviews. 100 parents and 85 teachers participated in the second part of the research. A total of 27 responsibility items covering the five themes were presented. Participants were asked to indicate how responsible do they think parents and teachers are on each item. The stress and difficulty relating to fulfilling responsibilities was also investigated. The results suggested that in children’s education, parents were generally rated as more responsible than teachers in four out of five themes. However, discrepancies in ratings were observed in terms of parents’ and teachers’ ratings of their own group. Parents rated their own group as highly responsible when it came to helping with children’s learning, and teachers tended to assign themselves greater responsibility than how parents rated their group. Finally, teachers reported higher stress levels than parents.

Findings of the current research demonstrated areas of responsibility believed to be important in children’s early education. Also, some potential tensions between parents and teachers were explored and both groups’ perceptions about the Chinese educational system were addressed. Future research in the area can extend from the current study with more diverse samples, higher grade levels, and factors related to perceived responsibility.

Authors: Ye, L

• Type of award: MSc taught course
• Level of award: Masters
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: Responsibility in children's education; Chinese parents and teachers; Perceived responsibility; Mixed methods research; CDE; Parent-teacher relationship; Responsibility assignment; Primary school education in China; CDE2021
• Subjects: Mixed methods research; Education (Early childhood); Education; Parent-teacher relationships; Child development