The project is a two-year longitudinal study aims at examining the roles of parents’ educational expectation, educational investment, parental stress and parenting style as potential mediators to the relationship. 300 five-year-old children attending the final year of kindergarten education (K3), with half from disadvantaged families, will be recruited via stratified random sampling and followed through until their second year primary education (P2). The children will undertake Raven’s Standard Progressive Matrices test to measure their non-verbal cognitive ability. They will also undertake standardized language tests in both Cantonese and English which will indicate their readiness for literacy instruction in their first and second language at the baseline assessment. With respect to the home mediating variables, we will interview children’s parents during baseline assessment to collect data on parental educational expectation, educational investment, parental stress and parenting style, and assess their relative importance in mediating the impact of poverty on children’s learning outcomes. The same assessments will be conducted when the children finished the second year of their primary education. |
