Parents' Perceptions of the Malleability of their Child's Academic Competencies

This study set out to examine parents' perceptions of the malleability of their child's academic competencies. A total of 97 mothers and fathers were asked to rate their child's potential for improving her/his competencies in mathematics and Finnish, using both intrapersonal and interpersonal criteria in their ratings. These two criteria were found to correlate closely with each other, suggesting that parents resorted to the school's normative frame in their interpretations of the malleability of the child's academic competencies. Furthermore, the parents seemed to evince a self-serving attribution pattern when rating their child's academic competencies and the malleability of these competencies, and this pattern was stronger among the academically educated than the vocationally educated parents for mathematics.