Wanting to make parents proud of exam results can increase anxiety and impact performance, finds new research

The study, presented at the BPS Psychology of Education Annual Conference, examined exactly how students experience their parents' motivational messages regarding exams.

Lead researcher, Dr Richard Remedios, from Nottingham Trent University's School of Social Sciences found that there are four constructs that can help predict student motivation.

The constructs are - Consequence, that is, the degree to which students experience being told by their parents that they need to work hard to receive their desired outcome.

Another was Reassurance - the degree to which students received reassuring messages from their parents e.g., how often parents do your tell you that there are other options if you don't do well in your A-levels?

Another was Pride - the degree to which students wanted to make their parents proud; and the fourth was the amount that students changed their behaviour e.g., stopped revising, when their parents reminded them about upcoming exams.

In the study, 1157 A-level students were asked to complete the parental motivational messages questionnaire. One important finding was that pride was positively related to anxiety - suggesting that wanting to make ones parents proud also related to a great deal of worry about the achievement of that aim. Consequence messages are usually the most anxiety-provoking types of messages but in this study, consequence messages were less related to anxiety than pride.

Findings also revealed that females were more likely to want to make their parents proud – possibly because pride and anxiety are driven by social expectation which is often a more female focused aim.

Dr Richard Remedios, Associate Professor in Student Motivation and Engagement Psychology, said:

"Our work is different because rather than focussing on the (many well-meaning motivational) messages we know parents give, we focused on how students experience messages based on their individual characteristics.

For example, our previous research has shown that confident student is likely to experiences messages differently to a student who is not confident.

What the findings from this specific study seems to be showing is that wanting to make your parents proud is a complex motivational situation.

As we continue our work, we will examine what types of individual differences drive pride as a motivator and in what circumstance can pride be a positive motivational experience."

If anyone in interested in doing work or has done work on the psychology of pride in parental or educational contexts, Dr Remedios and his colleagues would be pleased to hear from you [email protected].