Role Division Between Parents and Teachers in Home-School Cooperation: Mediating Effect Based on Teachers' Expectations and Perceptions

Yanqi Guo^1*Anne Li Jiang²Congman Rao²Dandan Zhang³

• ¹Liaoning University, Shenyang, China
• ²Northeast Normal University, ChangChun, China
• ³Guangdong University of Finance & Economics, GuangZhou, China

This study explores the key issue of role ambiguity in family school cooperation by investigating the mediating role of teacher expectations and perceptions, as well as the moderating role of school support. Using teacher samples from different regions and types of schools in China, data was collected through a self-developed multidimensional Likert scale questionnaire to evaluate role delineation, teacher expectations, teacher perception, and school support. The results of the series mediation analysis indicate that teacher expectations and perceptions jointly form a significant dual pathway mediation system. Teachers expect to regulate a significant portion of the overall impact of school support on role delineation by establishing predetermined responsibility boundaries, while teachers perceive that an additional portion is regulated through dynamic feedback mechanisms. Significant continuous mediation effects were also discovered. In addition, school support exhibits asymmetric moderating effects: policy integrity linearly amplifies the expected path, while resource investment intensity only activates the perceived path after exceeding a threshold. Bayesian SEM and latent contour analysis validated these approaches and identified a specific collaborative pattern that demonstrated the best role partitioning performance. In summary, the alignment between institutional support and teachers' psychological mechanisms—specifically their preset expectations and real-time perceptions-is paramount for clarifying role boundaries in home-school collaboration. These findings, while constrained by the single perspective of teachers, offer preliminary insights into the psychological and institutional mechanisms underlying home-school collaboration. It highlights the potential value of aligning support systems with teachers' cognitive processes, though future research incorporating multi-stakeholder views is needed to develop comprehensive practical frameworks.