Content area
Full Text
This study examined students' preferences for authoritative, authoritarian, and permissive teaching styles using a hypothetical vignette approach. In addition, the authors assessed how students' preferences for these different teaching styles might be moderated by the parenting style of their parents. 310 university students (19.4% male, M age = 19.7 years) evaluated a candidate for a hypothetical professor position described as having either a permissive, authoritarian, or authoritative teaching style. Participants also completed a questionnaire, on which they described their own parents on the dimensions of acceptance and strictness. Students preferred the authoritative candidate but this preference was not moderated by the parenting style of the students' parents. These findings offer further evidence for the analogy between parenting styles and teaching styles.
The present study explored the analogy between teaching and parenting by examining the utility of applying the concept of parenting styles from developmental psychology to different styles of teaching college students. Just as not all mothers and fathers parent in the same way, there is likely a great deal of variability in how teachers relate to students and try to regulate their behavior.
One of the most popular classification schemes used in describing parenting style is Baumrind's (1971) model, in which parents are labeled as falling into one of three categories: permissive, authoritarian, or authoritative. Membership in these categories is based in large part on the extent to which parents display affection and concern for their children, a dimension labeled warmth/nurturance, and on how much and in what ways parents try to regulate, limit, and influence their children's behavior, a dimension labeled control/strictness. Permissive parents are high on the warmth/nurturance dimension but low on the control/strictness dimension. They express love and concern for their children but set few rules and expectations for their behavior and enforce the rules they do set whimsically or inconsistently. Inversely, authoritarian parents are low on the warmth/nurturance dimension but high on the control/strictness dimension. They are infrequently affectionate or emotionally expressive but set strict and rigid rules. Authoritarian parents expect absolute and unquestioning obedience to their rules and attempt to enforce rules via fear of punishment.
In contrast, authoritative parents are high on both the warmth/nurturance and control/strictness dimensions. Authoritative parents differ quantitatively from authoritarian ones on the...