Does parental bonding predict learning strategies with achievement goals and achievement emotions as mediators?

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationships between achievement goals, achievement emotions and learning strategies with parental bonding as a predictor. Secondary school students from Hong Kong (N=238) were participated in the study that was conducted by convenience sampling. With parental consent, participants filled in 4 sets of self-report questionnaires measuring parent-child bonding, academic achievement emotions, academic goals orientation as well as cognitive and metacognitive learning strategies. Good to excellent reliability was reported. Significant factor loading in confirmatory factor analysis was also found. A satisfying structured equation model was developed to demonstrate parental bonding predicting achievement emotions, achievement goals and subsequently learning strategies. The result showed that parental bonding maintained equal effects on predicting positive achievement emotions and achievement goals. It indicated that not only care, but authoritarianism also positively associated with children’s academic emotions and performance in Chinese culture. Moreover, comparing with positive achievement emotions, achievement goals had stronger mediating effect (β =.52>.27) on parental bonding and learning strategies. Therefore, it showed that achievement goals were better in mediating parent-child attachment and cognitive learning strategies. Studies exploring parent-child relationships and learning in Chinese culture were fruitful. However, many studies were only targeted on undergraduate students. In this research, all participants were aged 15-18. The generalization towards parental bonding and learning in Chinese culture has been extended and confirmed. Chinese parents especially who had offspring in secondary school were more aware of the influences of parent-child relationship on children’s academic performances. Further studies regarding parental bonding, achievement goals and emotions as well as learning strategies targeted on participants with various ages were recommended as different ages might be correlated with different dimensions of parental bonding.
Keywords: Parental bonding, Positive achievement emotions, 3x2 Achievement goals, Learning strategies