Kumon or Montessori? It may depend on your politics, according to new study of 8,500 parents
2021-03-30
(Press-News.org) HOUSTON - (March 30, 2021) - Whether parents prefer a conformance-oriented or independence-oriented supplemental education program for their children depends on political ideology, according to a study of more than 8,500 American parents by a research team from Rice University and the University of Texas at San Antonio.
"Conservative parents have a higher need for structure, which drives their preference for conformance-oriented programs," said study co-author Vikas Mittal, a professor of marketing at Rice's Jones Graduate School of Business. "Many parents are surprised to learn that their political identity can affect the educational choices they make for their children."
Supplemental education programs include private tutoring, test preparation support and educational books and materials as well as online educational support services. The global market for private tutoring services is forecasted to reach $260.7 billion by 2024, and the U.S. market for tutoring is reported to be more than $8.9 billion a year. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are more than 100,000 businesses in the private education services industry. Supplemental education program brands are among the top 500 franchises in Entrepreneur magazine's 2020 rankings, and they include popular providers such as Kumon (ranked No. 12), Mathnasium (No. 29) and Huntington Learning Center (No. 39).
For over five decades, education psychologists have utilized two pedagogical orientations --conformance orientation and independence orientation. A conformance orientation is more standardized and guided, emphasizing lecture-based content delivery, knowledge and memorization, frequent use of homework assignments, standardized examinations with relative evaluation and classroom attendance discipline and rules. In contrast, an independence orientation features discussion-based seminars and student-led presentations, an emphasis on ideas rather than facts, use of multimodal interaction instead of books, and highly variable and unstructured class routines. The two approaches do not differ in terms of topics covered in the curriculum or the specific qualities to be imparted to students.
The research team asked parents about their preferences for different programs framed as conformance- or independence-oriented. In five studies of more than 8,500 parents, conservative parents preferred education programs that were framed as conformance-oriented, while liberal parents preferred independence-oriented education programs. This differential preference emerged for different measures of parents' political identity: their party affiliation, self-reported political leaning and whether they watch Fox or CNN/MSNBC for news.
"By understanding the underlying motivations behind parents' preferences, educational programs' appeal to parents can be substantially enhanced," Mittal said. "Supplemental tutoring will be a major expenditure and investment for parents grappling with their child's academic performance in the post-pandemic era. Informal conversations show parents gearing up to supplement school-based education with tutoring. Despite this, very little research exists about the factors that affect parents' preference for and utilization of supplemental education."
Mittal cautioned that these results do not speak to ultimate student performance. "This study only speaks to parents' preferences but does not study ultimate student achievement," he said.
INFORMATION:
The paper, "Political Identity and Preference for Supplemental Educational Programs," which is forthcoming in the Journal of Marketing Research, was co-authored by professor Jihye Jung of UTSA. It can be downloaded at https://doi.org/10.1177/00222437211004252.
To schedule an interview with Mittal or to request a copy of the study, contact Jeff Falk, director of national media relations at Rice, at jfalk@rice.edu or 713-348-6775.
Related materials:
Mittal bio: https://business.rice.edu/person/vikas-mittal
Rice's Jones Graduate School of Business: http://business.rice.edu
Follow the Jones School on Twitter @Rice_Biz.
Follow Rice News and Media Relations on Twitter @RiceUNews.
ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:
2021-03-30
Boulder, Colo., USA: Anthropogenic climate change is one of the foremost scientific and societal challenges. In part, our response to this global challenge requires an enhanced understanding of how the Earth's surface responds to episodes of climatic heating and cooling. As historical records extend back only a few hundred years, we must look back into the ancient rock record to see how the surface of the Earth has responded to shifts between icehouse (presence of ice at the Earth's poles) and greenhouse (no substantial ice at Earth's poles) climates in the past.
In ...
2021-03-30
NEW YORK, NY (March 30, 2021)--Early in the pandemic, neurologists expressed concern that COVID-19 patients with dementia may be at higher risk for complications and mortality.
But those fears have not been realized, according to a new study of patients who were hospitalized with COVID-19 during the first wave of the pandemic in New York City. The study, led by James Noble, MD, MS, associate professor of neurology at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons and the Taub Institute for Research on Alzheimer's Disease and the Aging Brain, and Amro Harb, a Vagelos medical student, was published this month in ...
2021-03-30
A year ago scientists everywhere were scrambling to get their minds around the SARS-CoV-2, a novel coronavirus that caused the pandemic from which we are only now beginning to emerge. The world clung to every new development, every bit of science that could provide clues to managing life in the presence of this mysterious killer.
Many science-backed COVID-19 management concepts remain unchanged to this day: handwashing with soap and warm water disrupts the virus' lipid membrane. Social distancing can attenuate the virus's spread, ideally keeping it out of a host until it degrades. Other notions, such as droplet contact being the primary mode of transmission, were modified when emerging evidence showed that under ...
2021-03-30
Not all species may travel the same path to existence, at least according to new findings from the University of Colorado Boulder and collaborators.
This new research, out now in Science, looked at a newly discovered, endangered songbird located only in South America--the Iberá Seedeater--and found that this bird followed a very rare evolutionary path to come into existence at a much faster pace than the grand majority of species.
By comparing this bird to a closely related neighbor (the Tawny-Bellied Seedeater) in the same group (the southern capuchino seedeaters), the researchers determined that genetic shuffling of existing variations, rather than new random mutations, brought this species into existence--and their ...
2021-03-30
CORVALLIS, Ore. - Oregon State University researchers broadcast marbled murrelet calls in mature forests and found that the threatened seabirds' choice of breeding locations is strongly influenced by whether they hear other murrelets in the area.
The research by scientists in the OSU College of Forestry and College of Agricultural Sciences is important because the elusive seabird's populations are in decline and recovery may be hindered by there being too few birds around to provide information to each other about where to nest.
Findings were published in Ornithology, the the flagship journal of the American Ornithologists Union.
"The odds that marbled murrelets would ...
2021-03-30
On sultry summer afternoons, heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) systems provide much-needed relief from the harsh heat and humidity. These systems, which often come with dehumidifiers, are currently not energy efficient, guzzling around 76% of the electricity in commercial and residential buildings.
In a new study, Texas A&M University researchers have described an organic material, called polyimides, that uses less energy to dry air. Furthermore, the researchers said polyimide-based dehumidifiers can bring down the price of HVAC systems, which currently cost thousands of dollars.
"In this study, we took an existing and rather robust polymer and then improved its dehumidification efficiency," said Hae-Kwon Jeong, McFerrin Professor in the Artie McFerrin ...
2021-03-30
Since early in the COVID-19 pandemic, parents, teachers, and school administrators have faced difficult questions regarding when and how to safely reopen for in-person learning. During the 2020-2021 fall semester, school districts around the United States navigated their reopening plans -- many opting for exclusively online learning or hybrid models -- with little data on how SARS-CoV-2 spreads among children or how in-person learning would impact transmission in the schools' communities. A new study in The Journal of School Health joins a growing body of evidence that, with appropriate measures, there are ways for schools to safely reopen.
In this study, scientists analyzed data from two large, independent k-12 schools that re-opened for in-person learning ...
2021-03-30
WASHINGTON--A vast global ocean may have covered early Earth during the early Archean eon, 4 to 3.2 billion years ago, a side effect of having a hotter mantle than today, according to new research.
The new findings challenge earlier assumptions that the size of the Earth's global ocean has remained constant over time and offer clues to how its size may have changed throughout geologic time, according to the study's authors.
Most of Earth's surface water exists in the oceans. But there is a second reservoir of water deep in Earth's interior, in the form of hydrogen and oxygen attached to minerals in the mantle.
A new study in AGU Advances, which publishes high-impact, open-access research and commentary across the Earth and space sciences, estimates how much water ...
2021-03-30
A researcher from Skoltech and his German colleagues have developed a neural network-based classification algorithm that can use data from an apple orchard to predict how well apples will fare in long-term storage. The paper was published in Computers and Electronics in Agriculture.
Before the fruit and vegetables we all like end up on our tables, they have to be stored for quite some time, and during this time they can develop physiological disorders such as flesh browning or superficial scald (brown or black patches on the skin of the fruit). These disorders contribute to the loss of a substantial amount ...
2021-03-30
Some 8,300 million metric tons of plastics have been manufactured since production exploded in the 1950s, with more than 75 percent ending up as waste and 15 million metric tons reaching oceans every year. Plastic waste fragments into increasingly smaller but environmentally persistent "microplastics," with potentially harmful effects on the health of people, wildlife and ecosystems. A new collection, "Confronting Plastic Pollution to Protect Environmental and Public Health," is publishing on March 30th, 2021 in the open access journal PLOS Biology that addresses critical scientific challenges in understanding the impacts of microplastics.
The collection features three evidence-based commentaries from ecotoxicology and environmental health ...
LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:
[Press-News.org] Kumon or Montessori? It may depend on your politics, according to new study of 8,500 parents
