How accurately can parents judge their children's boredom in school? : Contrasting students’ and parents’ perceptions of boredom frequency, antecedents, and coping strategies

Abstract

The purpose of the present study was to explore how much parents know about their children’s boredom in school. This knowledge is highly important for parents desiring to help their children reduce this emotion (e.g., through parent-teacher talks or developing strategies to avoid boredom,). The high relevance of boredom at school is reflected in studies indicating that students experience this emotion during more than 30% of their time spent in class (Larson & Richards, 1991; Nett, Goetz, & Hall, 2011). Students experiencing boredom in class are at risk of experiencing negative consequences such as shallow information processing, low attentiveness, and reduced effort, which often lead to even more severe consequences including absenteeism and dropout (Pekrun et al., 2010). The present study is the first to investigate how reliable parents are as sources of information regarding their children’s frequency of boredom, the antecedents that lead to this emotion, and how their children cope with boredom.A 23-item questionnaire was administered to N = 437 grade 9 students (mean age: 14.82 years; 54% female) and their parents measuring the above-mentioned aspects of boredom specifically in the subject domain of mathematics. Each item was answered on a 5-point Likert scale (1 = strongly disagree to 5 = strongly agree). The mean correlation between students’ and parents’ perspective across all scales was r = .34, indicating that parents perceive facets of their own children’s boredom fairly inadequately in relation to those of other children. In contrast, parents judged their children’s absolute values on those items rather adequately. On average, 43% of the parents correctly judged their children’s scores for items on the frequency of boredom. When additionally taking parents into account who over- or underestimated their children’s scores by +/- 1 score point, the percentage was as high as 82%. The average percentage of correct judgments was 36% for the antecedents of boredom (e.g., items referring to being underchallenged, being overchallenged, and teacher’s personality), and 31% for coping with boredom (e.g., items referring to reactivating attention, accepting boredom, and searching for distraction).In sum, these findings imply that parents seem to know to what extent their children experience boredom, are well aware of the antecedents of this emotion, as well as how their children cope with boredom. However, the high frequency of students’ boredom at school suggests that parents might not have sufficient information about how to support their children in reducing boredom, or that their efforts to support their children are not successful. Parents could help their children to fight factors that cause boredom (e.g., by supporting children’s learning when boredom is due to being overchallenged) and by helping them to develop more efficient coping strategies (e.g., trying to reactivate attention). Based on the current findings that parents actually know a lot about their children’s boredom, future research should explore how they can help their children with reducing boredom at school.