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Urban Parents' Motivation Regarding Their Child's Participation in STEM and Agricultural Activities

<p>Parents play a major role in the choices their children make
regarding academics, leisure activities, and college and career preparation.
Parent outcome expectations and behaviors are informed by their parenting
self-efficacy in a specific subject or task. Parenting self-efficacy is the
confidence parents have in their abilities to influence their children’s
motivation, environments, and behaviors that could result in positive youth development.
Parenting self-efficacy is informed by personal factors and experiences.
Parenting self-efficacy can help to describe why or why not a parent engages in
certain activities with their child.</p>

<p>The purpose of this
study was to explore and describe how the motivation of parents of urban middle
school students plays a role in their child’s interest in agriculture or
STEM-related activities. The convenience sample for this study were parents of
urban middle schools in Indianapolis, IN (<i>N
</i>= 53) who’s children participated in afterschool programs. Quantitative
data were collected using a parenting self-efficacy questionnaire, which
included items related to participants’ parenting self-efficacy (PSE) as it
pertains to their child’s academics, STEM and agricultural activities; parent
outcome expectations (POE) as it pertains to their child’s college and career
preparation, and discussing STEM and agriculture activities with their child;
and, parents’ perceptions of their child’s post-secondary career and
educational options and intended career field. Descriptive statistics including
means, standard deviations, frequencies, and percentages were used to analyze
the data. Correlations were computed to explore the relationships between the
variables.</p>

<p>There were four
conclusions for this study. First, urban parents were self-efficacious
regarding their child’s academic performance and STEM activities, and had
positive outcomes expectations regarding their child’s college and career
preparation and engaging their child in agriculture and STEM activities.
Second, on average urban parents reported participating in four different types
of activities with their child, and recreational sports, visiting museums,
computer games, and visiting the zoo were most popular. Third, urban parents
agreed that their child would most likely pursue an associate or bachelor’s
degree in arts, humanities, and social sciences as their post-secondary
options. Finally, urban parents’ parenting self-efficacy for academic
performance, STEM, and agriculture were positively related to parents’ outcome
expectations regarding agricultural activities. Moreover, parenting
self-efficacy regarding agricultural activities was positively related to the
number of activities parents did with their children. Implications for practice
and recommendations for future research were discussed.</p>

  1. 10.25394/pgs.7462238.v1
Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:purdue.edu/oai:figshare.com:article/7462238
Date16 January 2019
CreatorsAlexandria L. Pettigrew (5930786)
Source SetsPurdue University
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeText, Thesis
RightsCC BY 4.0
Relationhttps://figshare.com/articles/Urban_Parents_Motivation_Regarding_Their_Child_s_Participation_in_STEM_and_Agricultural_Activities/7462238

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