The purpose of the current study was two-fold. The first purpose was to explore the role of parental academic pressure in predicting Korean adolescents’ achievement goals and affect within specific classroom learning situations. The second purpose was to examine whether students’ perceptions of social support in the classroom would mediate the relationships of parental academic pressure with other variables. Previous studies have indicated that the psychological and social environment perceived by adolescents play a critical role in their personal motivation modeling processes (Eccles, Midgley et al., 1993; Eccles, Wigfield et al., 1993). Pressure from parents to achieve well academically can cause students to feel more stressful and helpless and make them focus on certain types of achievement goals more strongly (Bong, 2008). Hence, we hypothesized that Korean adolescents with different degrees of parental academic pressure would likely, which would affect the type of achievement goals and affect they adopt and experience in learning situations. One contribution of the current study is, therefore, that we added to the literature on the impact of parental pressure on children’s achievement goals and classroom-related affect, which has largely remained unexplored.
Besides parental academic pressure, we were also interested in whether students would perceive different degrees of support from their teachers and peers, depending on their degrees of parental academic pressure and whether these perceptions of support would function as another source of influence on their achievement goals and affect within the classroom. Our decision to examine the role of social support along with parental academic pressure were based on the finding that individuals in East Asian cultures tended to hold interdependent self-construal (Markus & Kitayama, 1991; Oishi & Diener, 2001). We believe that Korean adolescents share this characteristics and would endeavor to maintain harmonious relationships with significant others in their social network. Another contribution of the present study is that we systematically examined the relative contribution of parents, teachers, and peers on student motivation in specific subject matter classes as potential mediators in the predictive relationships of other variables of interest.
In sum, we hypothesized that students’ perceptions of parental academic pressure would predict support from teachers and peers. We also hypothesized that these perceptions of psychological and social environment would translate into different achievement goals and affect in the classroom.

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