Effects of Parenting Style on Students’ Achievement Goal Orientation: A Study on High School Students

This study intends to determine the effects of parenting styles, as perceived by parents, on high school students’ achievement goal orientations. The study was conducted on 497 students and their parents selected via simple cluster sampling from public high schools of the Ministry of Education in Amasya, a city in Turkey. Data were collected by means of a personal information form prepared by the researcher, the Parents Attitude Scale (PAS) and the 2x2 Achievement Goal Orientation Scale. Data analysis includes multiple regression analysis, as well as descriptive statistics. Based on research findings, parenting styles perceived by parents can be listed as democratic, overprotective, permissive and authoritarian. Students’ achievement goal orientation follows the order of learning-approach, learning-avoidance, performance-approach and performance-avoidance. Another finding obtained in the study shows a positive and medium level relationship between parenting style and learning approach orientation and a positive and low level relationship between parenting style and learning avoidance orientation. Democratic and overprotective parenting styles were found to have the strongest and the most significant impact on learning approach orientation whereas overprotective and permissive parenting styles had the most significant impact on learning avoidance orientation. Parenting style was found to have a low level positive relationship with performance approach and performance avoidance orientation. Analyses show that authoritarian and overprotective parenting styles had the most significant impact on both orientations.


Introduction
Family is the setting in which children gain necessary skills, such as decision-making, responsibility, showing respect to others, showing affection and receiving love, fulfilling social roles and expressing creativity (Dil & Bulantekin, 2011) and start their first education. While raising their children, parents use different methods based on various attitudes and behaviours. Attitudes and behaviours that parents have may change according to their personal characteristics, their social and psychological situations, the characteristics of the child and the behaviour that the child displays. All these variables cause parents to display different behaviours which form their parenting style.
Parenting style has a crucial role in a child's social and educational development. Parenting Style is a psychological structure that represents standard strategies parents use in child rearing and includes parental attitudes and behaviours (Kordi & Baharudin, 2010). Parenting style has an effect on selfefficacy, self-respect, self-development, and academic motivation, as well as the behaviours of the individual (Brown & Iyengar, 2008).
One of the issues affecting individual learning is the parent's attitude towards the child.
Another concept related to student achievement is achievement goal orientation. Achievement goal orientation is a socio-cognitive theory that focuses on the reasons for involvement in learning tasks and their goals in terms of personal achievement (Middleton & Midgley, 1997). Achievement goal orientation can be expressed as individuals' personal beliefs established to arrange their skills or to reveal the goals set out to be successful (Ames, 1992) and also personal perceptions about the reasons for learning and focusing on goals to continue being successful (Kaplan & Maehr, 2007). In this context, it can be said that achievement goal orientation makes a difference in students' behaviours (Buluş, 2011) at school and their use of different learning strategies (İzci & Koç, 2012). These differences can also be seen in students' academic success.
This study intends to examine the effects of parenting style, as perceived by parents, on high school students' achievement goal orientations. It is believed that the findings of this study regarding the relationship between parenting style and achievement goal orientation will be important in terms of generation of data for teachers and parents to provide students with healthier educational outcomes.
While there are some studies in the literature which investigates the association between the two variables in question (Lamborn, Mounts, Steinberg, & Dornbusch, 1991;Mital, 2011;Gonzalez, Greenwood & WenHsu 2001;Lerdpornkulrat, Koul, Sujivorakul, 2012;Mahasneh, 2014), no study has so far focused on the relationship between parenting style and achievement goal orientation in Turkey. So it is believed that this study will contribute to the literature.
This study seeks for the answers to the questions provided below; themselves as representative of social authority (Aksaray, 1992), and they concentrate on children's mistakes and failures (Gander & Gardiner, 1995), exhibiting excessive authoritarian attitudes (Vural, 2004).
Permissive parents display a high degree of warmth, but they are undemanding and do not have high expectations. According to this permissive and passive parenting style, the only way to show love to adolescents is to indulge all their wishes. Expressions such as, "Of course you can stay out late if you want" may be used by these parents. Permissive parents do not want to cause disappointment by saying no. Therefore, adolescents may make many decisions independently from their parents. This situation may cause difficulties for the adolescents in controlling themselves and may result in tendencies to display egocentric behaviours (Baumrind, 1991). The permissive and loose attitudes of the parents cause children to be spoiled and expect that they will be given priority over the other individuals in the society. When they are not given priority, the individuals feel restless and uncomfortable and cannot adapt to social relationships outside the family (Ekşi, 1990).
With apathetic parents, since parents feel the excitement and enthusiasm of being a parent at low levels, this situation may affect their relationships with their children. They generally evaluate the events independently from their lives while meeting children's needs and may ignore some needs, even in the strangest situations. This may create a lack of self-control. Moreover, children's selfrespect and proficiency levels may be affected negatively (Baumrind, Larzelere & Owens, 2010).
Overprotective parents control the environment more than required since they perceive it as hostile and dangerous. The factors that make this happen may be the death of the first child, having a difficult pregnancy period or unable to have children in long terms, or having grown up in an apathetic environment during their childhood (Çağdaş ve Seçer, 2006). Parents exhibiting these attitudes may cause their children to be unable to develop their own power since they show a control and sensitivity beyond expectation. Children raised in this kind of environment may show behaviours, such as being excessively independent from others, disappointed, insecure and rebellious (Tuzgöl, 1998). In addition, these individuals cannot develop good self-management of emotions and as a result, they may grow up to be individuals who are indecisive, unsatisfied and irresponsible (Yavuzer, 2000).

Achievement Goal Orientation
At the turn of the 20th century, achievement goal orientation theory was regarded as a pioneering approach to motivation. The main focus of this theory is identifying the reasons for school and in-class achievement, rather than identifying the degree of motivation to learn in numeric terms (Kaplan & Maehr, 2007;Elliot & McGregor, 2001). Achievement goal orientation can be expressed as individuals' personal beliefs established to arrange their skills or to reveal the goals set out to be successful (Ames, 1992) and as personal perceptions about the reasons for learning and focusing on goals to continue being successful (Kaplan & Maehr, 2007;Pintrich, 2000).

Achievement goal orientation informs us about why and how individuals study to succeed.
That is to say, achievement goal orientation is the main reason individuals are motivated to succeed.
This theory is interested in why students follow a certain path in order to succeed in tasks by focusing on goals to continue their achievement (Kaplan & Maehr, 2007;Pintrich, 2000). This theory was created to reveal the reasons behind student performance while undertaking classroom activities, learning formations and academic tasks. At the same time, achievement goal orientation theory focuses on what the students think while identifying goals in the situations mentioned above. In fact, the desire to succeed and to avoid failure motivates individuals (Middleton & Midgley, 1997). In this context, it can be said that achievement goal orientation also has an effect on shaping students' school behaviours (Buluş, 2011).
Although there are different types of achievement goal orientation, they can be subsumed into two broad categories: performance goal orientation and learning goal orientation.
Performance Goal Orientation dwells on displaying skills by taking others as references and is based on proving ability or avoidance of seeming incompetent (Jagacinski & Duda, 2001).
Performance goal orientation has outcomes such as unwillingness to ask for academic support (Ryan & Stiller, 1991), cheating (Anderman, Griesinger & Westerfield, 1998), withdrawal in the face of failure (Dweck & Leggett, 1988) and use of artificial browsing strategies (Greene & Miller, 1996). To be judged well by others is very important for students with performance goal orientation and these students avoid being evaluated negatively. These individuals are generally extrinsically motivated.
When they make mistakes, they perceive them as failure and may easily quit what they are studying.
These individuals have a hard time facing difficult situations, pay attention to look competent and try to make a good impression by putting effort into being successful or avoiding failure (Greene & Miller, 1996). Performance goal orientation points to a low degree of performance avoidance and intrinsic motivation whereas performance approach can be said to have a positive relationship with performance. According to Pintrich (2000), while students with performance approach orientation aim to be the best in class, to be the student with the best performance and the one with the highest grades compared to classmates and to focus on looking successful rather than learning, students with performance avoidance orientation avoid being unqualified, looking incompetent when compared with others, being the student with the lowest performance and receiving the worst grades in the classroom.
According to Özgüngör (2014), in performance-approach orientation, individuals have the effort of proving superiority to others on the academic level, whereas those who are in performance-avodiance orientation are in the situation of trying not to show herself/himself as weak on academic level.
In classrooms where the majority of students have performance approach orientation, academic progress is slow, learning is based on rote learning rather than meaningful learning and all activities are undertaken for the sake of getting good grades (Kaplan & Maehr, 2007). Also, students with this type of learning orientation may want to be successful to ensure parental satisfaction, to dominate the classroom, to feel important and to avoid looking stupid or avoid feelings of shame (Pajares, Britner & Valiante, 2000).
Learning goal orientation is related to student desire to have a complete command of the topic and to learn well in the learning process. Students with learning goal orientation consider skills to be equal to learning. Individuals with this type of orientation believe that effort increases the ability to gain skills and compare their past and current performances to determine their development (Schunk, 1996). Those who have learning goal orientation know how problems occur and how to cope with them. They never decrease their motivation when they come across difficult situations. They try to do their best on the basic tasks during this process. They use different cognitive strategies and methods during the learning process (İzci & Koç, 2012).
Research shows that individuals with learning goal orientation are successful in learning (Pajares & Cheong, 2003;Tanaka & Ysmauchi, 2001). Learning goal orientation is evaluated through approaching and avoidance dimensions, as in performance orientation. According to Pintrich (2000), while students with learning goal orientation aim to learn the topic in depth, develop themselves, show progress and exceed the standards they have determined, students with learning avoidance orientation avoid being misunderstood, not being able to learn the topic completely and making wrong connections with their previous learning.
When individuals decide what they want to learn based on their interests and expectations, they have intrinsic motivation to complete tasks (Amabile, 1996). However, when they learn only to get good grades without the expectation to improve themselves, they will develop extrinsic motivation. Intrinsic and extrinsic motivation correspond to learning approach orientation and performance approach orientation, respectively. Compared to students with performance approach orientation, students with learning approach orientation are motivated to succeed for longer periods of time and are more successful at associating knowledge in cognitive processes (Potter, Christine & McCormick, 1994).

Material and Methods
This study is a descriptive one which was designed as a correlational research so as to determine the effects of parenting styles, as perceived by parents, on high school students' achievement goal orientation. Berends (2006) defines the researches aiming to determine certain variables as correlational research type. In this type of studies, the beliefs, values and attitudes are described in a systematic way (Williamson, Karp & Dalphin, 1977).

Study Group
The sample of the study was selected from students (n=6387) attending state high schools of the Ministry of Education in Amasya. The sample of the study consisted of 497 students and their parents selected via simple cluster sampling method. Table 1 presents the distribution of students based on demographic characteristics.  Table 1 shows that 46,7% of the participating students were females and 53,3% were males. In terms of grade variable, 24,7% of the students were in 9 th grade, 30,2% in 10 th grade, 22,1% in 11 th grade and 22,9% in 12 th grade.

Data Collection Tools
Data were collected by means of a personal information form prepared by the researcher to collect personal data, the Parents Attitude Scale (PAS) developed by Demir & Şendil (2008) to determine parenting styles, and the "2x2 Achievement Goal Orientation Scale" developed by Akın (2006).

Personal Information Form:
The personal information form was prepared by the researcher to obtain the demographic characteristics (gender, grade level) of the participants. undertaken to determine the factor structure of the scale; item factor loads were found to be between .30 and .73. The first factor was titled "democratic attitude", since it entails acceptance of the child as an independent individual and encouragement of development of personality and free expression of ideas. The second factor was called "authoritarian attitude", since it does not involve the acceptance of the child as an independent individual, but rather supports the view that the parent owns the child and includes styles such as unconditional obedience to rules, one-way communication, oppression, and verbal and physical punishment. The third factor was termed "overprotective attitude", since it supports the view that the child is not self-sufficient and therefore should be constantly protected and it includes inappropriate interventions, excess control and avoidance of giving the child any responsibility. Finally, the fourth factor was called "permissive attitude", since it consists of behaviours such as welcoming everything that the child does, giving excessive freedom, and overindulging the child (Demir & Şendil, 2008 and .98 (Akın, 2006). Cronbach Alpha values for the factors in the current study were found to be between .86 and .92.

Data Analysis
SPSS 20 package program was utilized in the data analysis. Multi-regression analysis along with descriptive statistics, weighted mean and standard deviation values were used in the study. In the study, descriptive statistics that evaluate standard deviation and arithmetic mean were calculated in order to determine the perceptions of the students' achievement goal orientation and parenting style.
Multi regression analysis was used in order to determine the effect of parenting styles on students' achievement goal orientation. In order to evaluate the hypotheses of the analysis, linearity and normality tests were done before multi-regression analysis.

Results and Discussion
Findings related to the first sub problem: Table 2 presents the findings related to students' achievement goal orientation.  Table 2 points to learning approach as the variable with the highest means in students' achievement goal orientation, with a mean of =3,78. This is followed by learning avoidance with =3,25, performance approach with =3,06 and performance avoidance with =2,81.
Findings related to the second sub problem: Table 3 presents the findings related to parenting styles as perceived by the parents.

Findings related to the third sub problem
Findings related to the effects of parenting styles on students' achievement goal orientation are provided in Table 4.  T-test results related to the significance of regression coefficients show that only authoritarian and overprotective styles are significant predictors of performance avoidance orientation.
According to the findings obtained in the study, parenting styles as perceived by parents are listed as democratic, overprotective, permissive and authoritarian styles. The fact that democratic parenting style comes first in the parenting styles perceived by the students can be regarded as a positive situation when we consider the studies (Arnett, 2010, Brown & Iyengar, 2008 which express the positive relationship between democratic parenting style and academic success and intrinsic motivation. Since intrinsic motivation means enthusiasm and willingness to learn, it brings academic success. Furthermore, according to River (2006) who cites Baumrind (1973), children raised with the democratic parenting style have a strong belief in their self-capability when they face academic tasks and difficulties. From this perspective, it can be said that democratic parenting style contribute to one's self-efficacy. While there are some studies which express the positive effects of an authoritarian parenting style, there are more which express the positive effects of a democratic parenting style (Gonzalez, Greenwood & WhenHsu, 2001).
Parenting styles are generally assessed in cultural, racial and socio-economic contexts.
Therefore, they can have a different impact on goal orientation and student achievement (Rivers, 2006). According to Rivers (2006) who cites Baumrind (1973), children of authoritarian parents have beliefs of self-competence when they face academic tasks and difficulties. Although the democratic parenting style has many positive outcomes in general, there are some studies that emphasize the positive effects of the authoritarian parenting style (Gonzalez, Greenwood & WhenHsu, 2001).
Another finding of the study points to the order of students' achievement goal orientation as: learning approach, learning avoidance, performance approach and performance avoidance. In addition to these results, it was also found that parenting styles have a medium level significant relationship with learning approach orientation and a low level positive relationship with learning avoidance orientation. In the research done by Odacı, Berber Çelik and Çıkrıkçı (2013), it can be seen that learning goal orientation comes first. In the research, the students have higher points in achievement goal orientation than learning goal orientation and this can be seen as a positive situation that contributes to academic success. Dupeyrat & Marine (2005) state that learning approach has a positive effect on learning activities and their outputs, whereas performance approach, which centres upon showing oneself as good to the others, has a negative effect on learning outcomes. In this context, it can be evaluated that students internalize learning.
According to the another result of the study, parenting styles have a medium level meaningful relation with learning approach, and a low level meaningful relation in a positive direction with learning-avoidance approach, while the parenting styles with the most powerful and significant impact on learning approach orientation were democratic and overprotective styles, overprotective and permissive attitudes had a significant impact on learning avoidance orientation. It was found that parenting styles had a low level and significant relationship with performance approach and performance avoidance orientation. Analyses show authoritarian and overprotective styles had a significant impact on both orientations.
Parenting styles are generally evaluated in the cultural, racial and socio-economic context. These contextual factors can cause different effects on goal orientation and student success (Rivers, 2006). The literature review provides some studies focusing on the relationship between parenting styles and achievement goal orientation. For example, Rivers, Mullis, Fortner and Mullis (2012) and Rivers (2006) express that there is no meaningful relation between parenting style and achievement goal orientation. For instance, Lamborn et al. (1991) found that authoritative, authoritarian and permissive parenting styles have positive relationships with achievement goal orientation. On the other hand, WenHsu (2001) found that the authoritative parenting style is related to students' performance orientation. Rivers' (2006) study reported no significant relationships between parenting style and goal orientation, whereas Mital's (2011) study on 160 students pointed to relationships between students' learning goal orientation and the authoritative parenting style. In their study, Gonzalez et al. (2001) identified positive relationships between maternal authoritative style and learning orientation, and also between maternal authoritarian style and performance orientation.
The study conducted by Lerdponkulrat et al. (2012) reported that students who perceived their parents as empathetic had higher learning orientations and students who perceived their parents as authoritarian had higher performance avoidance goals. The study by Gonzalez, Holbein and Quilter (2002) on 196 students found that authoritarian and permissive parenting styles were related to performance orientation, and that authoritative style was related to learning orientation. The study on 650 university students by Mahasneh (2014) reported positive relationships between learning and performance orientations and democratic, authoritarian and permissive parenting styles and that authoritative parenting style is the best predictor of achievement goal orientation. On the other hand, Gafoor & Kurukkan (2014) express that democratic parenting style is the most effective on achievement goal orientation. Xu, Dai, Liu and Deng (2018) examined if and how adolescents' perceived parental psychological con-trol and autonomy support influence their maladaptive academic functioning through their achievement goal orientations and obtained that compared with girls, adolescent boys perceived higher parental psychological control. Moreover, we found distinct effects of parental psychological control and autonomy support on adolescents' maladaptive academic functioning through achievement goal orientations. Zong, Zhang and Yao (2018) investigated the relations between children's perception of different dimensions of parental involvement (i.e. home-based involvement, school-based involvement and academic socialisation) and their achievement goals, and the moderating role of parenting style (i.e. parental autonomy support vs. psychological control) and found that home-based involvement was positively associated with performance-approach goals, schoolbased involvement was positively associated with mastery goals, and academic socialisation was positively associated with both mastery and performance-approach goals. Alivernini, Manganelli and Lucidi (2018) conducted a study on a sample of 10th-grade students and found that classroom performance-approach goal structures were related to performance avoidance personal orientations but not to performance-approach personal orientations. They also obtained the finding showing that the Personal Achievement Goal Orientation scales measure three related but separate factors: Mastery, Performance-Approach, and Performance-Avoidance. Gunderson, Donnellan, Robins and Trzesniewski (2018), on the other hand, found that learning goals show divergent relations to child age and to parents' praise and criticism in elementary and middle school. It was also concluded in the study that making parents aware of the potentially positive effects of process praise and the potentially debilitating effects of person criticism might provide parents with more specific ideas about how to help encourage their children to adopt goals and behaviors that sustain academic motivation. In another study by Leung and Shek (2018), an attempt was made to examine the moderating effect of family functioning on the influence of maternal expectations of children's education on adolescent achievement motivation in poor single-mother families and it was found that maternal expectations and family functioning positively predicted achievement motivation of Chinese adolescents in poor single-mother families. Miller and Neumeister (2017) investigated relationships among gender, perceived parenting style, the personality traits of conscientiousness and neuroticism, perfectionism, and achievement goal orientation in a high ability and high achieving young adult population and found that self-oriented and socially prescribed perfectionism had a positive relationship with performance goal orientation, suggesting that students with these perfectionistic tendencies are also more likely to have performance goals. Seginer and Mahajna (2018) postulated some hypotheses and found that in contrast to western data and in accordance with other non-western findings, the relation between perceived parenting and academic achievement is indirect. For Muslim adolescents in Israel it is linked via self-empowerment and higher education future orientation for girls and boys, and in the marriage and family domain for girls only.
When the studies in the literature are analyzed, it can be said that parenting styles have an effect on students' achievement goal orientation, even though there are some studies which don't express any relation between parenting style and students' achievement goal orientation (Rivers at all.;2012 andRivers, 2006). When we evaluate these studies, we can say that the democratic parenting style has an effect on learning orientation, while the authoritarian parenting style has an effect on performance orientation. This shows that the findings of this research are supported by literature.

Recommendations
Based on both the research findings and the theoretical framework, it can be argued that parenting styles have important impacts on students' achievement goal orientations. The authoritative style predicts learning orientation and the authoritarian attitude predicts performance orientation.
Based on these results, some suggestions are provided below: 1-Teachers may be provided with seminars about identifying students' achievement goal orientations and its importance to academic achievement 2-School meetings or family seminars can be organized to create awareness about the relationships between parenting styles, student achievement and achievement goal orientation.

Conclusion
According to the findings of the study, it was concluded that the participants perceive democratic, overprotective, permissive and authoritarian parenting styles. Learning-approach, learning-avoidance, performance-approach and performance-avoidance are followed by students' achievement goal orientation in a sequence. A positive and medium level relationship between parenting style and learning approach orientation was found in the study. It was also found that a positive low level relationship between parenting style and learning avoidance orientation. Learning approach orientation was significantly affected by democratic and overprotective parenting styles, while learning avoidance orientation was affected by overprotective and permissive parenting styles.
There was a low level positive relationship with performance approach and performance avoidance orientation according to parenting style. It was found that authoritarian and overprotective parenting styles had the most significant impact on both orientations