The study examines the adaptation of educational expectations. It focuses on the expectations that parents have of their children during the transition from primary to secondary school in Germany. During this transition, students are placed into different ability tracks. It is examined whether parents react to this information about their child's achievement by adjusting their educational expectations or whether their expectations are nonreactive to the achievement information conveyed by track placement. It is hypothesized that parents are more likely to adapt their expectations regarding final educational attainment if their child's track placement is not consistent with the expectations that they held before the track placement was known. Furthermore, SES differences in this adjustment process are expected as parents of different social status have different orientations towards achievement information. The study uses data from the National Educational Panel Study (NEPS), Starting Cohort 2 and focuses on the years between the third grade of primary school and fifth grade, which is the first year of secondary school. This means that students and parents can be followed across the moment in the academic career at which track placement happens. Furthermore, the variations in the tracking decisions across the German federal states is used to examine how the adaptation of parents’ expectations is affected based on how much influence parents have on track placement. Two-way fixed effect models are employed to model the change of expectations between the two time points in the data. The results show that low-SES parents do adjust their expectations more strongly downward when their children receive a lower track placement than expected; however, high-SES parents maintain their high expectations even in light of such negative achievement information. High- and low-SES parents do not significantly differ in their expectation adjustment if their children's track placement is higher than their previous expectations.

该研究考察了教育期望的适应性。它侧重于父母在德国从小学到中学过渡期间对孩子的期望。在此过渡期间，学生被置于不同的能力轨道中。检查父母是否通过调整他们的教育期望对这些关于他们孩子成就的信息做出反应，或者他们的期望是否对通过轨道安置传达的成就信息没有反应。假设如果孩子的轨道安置与他们在轨道安置已知之前持有的期望不一致，则父母更有可能调整他们对最终教育成就的期望。此外，由于不同社会地位的父母对成就信息的取向不同，因此在这个调整过程中的社会经济地位差异是预料之中的。该研究使用来自全国教育小组研究 (NEPS) 的数据，即起始队列 2，重点关注小学三年级和五年级（即中学一年级）之间的年份。这意味着学生和家长可以在学术生涯中跟踪安置发生的那一刻进行跟踪。此外，德国联邦各州跟踪决策的变化用于根据父母对跟踪安置的影响程度来检查父母期望的适应如何受到影响。采用双向固定效应模型对数据中两个时间点之间的期望变化进行建模。结果表明，当他们的孩子接受比预期低的轨道安置时，低社会经济地位的父母确实会更强烈地向下调整他们的期望；然而，即使考虑到这些负面的成就信息，高社会经济地位的父母仍然保持着很高的期望。如果孩子的轨道安置高于他们之前的期望，高和低 SES 父母在他们的期望调整上没有显着差异。