CZECH PRIMARY PUPILS' LEARNING ASPIRATIONS IN RELATION TO PARENTS' APPROACHES.

Learning aspirations reflect personality dispositions and pupils' ability to achieve certain goals; they are the pupil's ideas about these goals at school formed by the pupil's self-concept and previous successes or failures. In pupils of younger school age, aspirations are strongly determined by parenting and parents' attitudes to the child's school career. In the operational phase, a socio-psychological approach was chosen, according to which aspirations are not only the conscious and rational disposition of a person, but in which the influence of the individual's social and cultural environment is also evident. Primary school pupils' learning aspirations were studied in relation to their parents' ideas. Primary school pupils (N = 293) were assigned a 50-item scaled questionnaire with a five-point scale determining to what extent they agreed with a particular statement. As part of the questionnaire validity process, an exploratory factor analysis was performed and after several solutions were proposed, an optimally interpretable factor structure with 27 items was chosen, such that 13 statements were excluded. Based on the factor loadings, items were subdivided into 6 factors with a total reliability of 0.8. The research tool was then re-administered to pupils (N = 332) to ascertain their learning aspirations and how they perceive their parents' approaches towards their school achievement. Analysis of the data thus obtained confirmed that pupils have a personal motivation for learning (M = 1.90) and it is important for them to achieve the best results at school (M = 1.41). For both mothers and fathers, the pupils perceive their parents as persons who are strongly engaged in their school career and interested in the child's school achievement (M = 1.65 for mothers and M = 1.63 for fathers). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]