Education and parenting in the Philippines

Filipino families place a high value on children’s educational achievement. Providing for children’s education is a primary goal of Filipino parents and conversely, children consider educational success as the means by which they can meet filial obligations and parental expectations. Interdependence in Filipino families is such that education-related decisions and behaviors reflect on family rather than individual welfare. This chapter presents the current Philippine education system and its challenges vis-a-vis this cultural context of the Filipino family, focusing particularly on families belonging to the lower socioeconomic class. Major education reforms known as the K-12 law occurred in 2013, expanding basic education to 13 years, but issues with low quality and ineffective resource allocation remain. Poverty has significant effects on student enrollment and completion rates, especially at the secondary or high school level. Given socioeconomic constraints, Filipino parents employ strategies to meet their family’s education aspirations, such as overseas migration

The effect of mathematical games on on-task behaviours in the primary classroom

A challenge for primary classroom teachers is to maintain students’ engagement with learning tasks while catering for their diverse needs, capabilities and interests. Multiple pedagogical approaches are employed to promote on-task behaviours in the mathematics classroom. There is a general assumption by educators that games ignite children’s on-task behaviours, but there is little systemically researched empirical data to support this claim. This paper compares students’ on-task behaviours during non-digital game-playing lessons compared with non-game-playing lessons. Six randomly selected grade 5 and 6 students (9–12 year olds) were observed during ten mathematics lessons. A total of 2,100 observations were recorded via an observational schedule and analysed by comparing the percentage of exhibited behaviours. The study found the children spent 93 % of the class-time exhibiting on-task engagement during the game-playing lessons compared with 72 % during the non-game-playing lessons. The game-playing lessons also promoted greater incidents of student talk related to the mathematical task (34 %) compared with the non-game playing lessons (11 %). These results support the argument that games serve to increase students’ time-on-task in mathematics lessons. Therefore, it is contended that use of games explicitly addressing the mathematical content being taught in a classroom is one way to increase engagement and, in turn, potential for learning

The Immigrant Advantage in Adolescent Educational Expectations

Previous research has shown uniquely high expectations among children of immigrants. However, existing studies have not focused on why children of immigrants have an expectations advantage over their native-born counterparts or if this has changed over time. This study shows that an immigrant advantage in graduate school expectations persists among adolescent children of immigrants today. Regression analyses reveal that this advantage is largely explained by higher parental expectations, greater interest in school, and foreign language use in early childhood. We argue that these factors can be conceptualized as forms of cultural capital stemming from unique aspects of the immigrant experience that are common across immigrant families