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Parental involvement in their children education
Introduction
Researchers have carried out various researches regarding parental involvement in education of their children, with many reports implying that increased levels of parental participation in the childs education can improve the students academic achievements.
Generally, children are mainly educated by their parents and teachers throughout their lives. Parents play a very important role in education, by partnering with teachers and students to enhance running of the education systems effectively. In order to assist the parents to become aware of the effectiveness of their partnering in education, teachers should involve dialogue with the parents early enough to discuss about the parents hopes and aspirations for their child.
Their understanding of the child needs and their suggestions about the ways that the teachers can help allow the teachers to be able to highlight their limitations and invite parents to participate in their childs education in definite ways (Nieto, 1996). For the child to perform well academically, it requires substantial support from parents.
Parents involvement in education of a child takes several ways including good parenting, provision of a secure and stable environment, intellectual stimulation, parent-child discussion, good models of constructive social and educational values and high aspiration relating to personal fulfillment and participation in the school events, work and governance (Desforges & Abouchaar, 2003. P.5). Therefore, the parents involvement normally touches on the school life and the individual assistance offered to the child at home and at school.
Parents and the school are very vital in the roles they play in the childrens education and their impact can be greater through partnering in their duties, since there is no clear line to show where the parents input stops and the teachers input begins in children education (UK Department for Education and Skills, 2003).
Statement of the Problem
What are the impacts of parental involvement on the educational progress of the children? For many researchers and educational experts, increased parental involvement in children education is always associated with positive students achievements; however, others disagree about what really makes the involvements to influence the students performance positively.
For the antagonists, they believe that studies to justify increased parental involvement lack scientific rigor, are mainly based on assumptions, the positions they support are not tenable, and many programs and policies supporting parental involvement are explicitly based on the evidence that does not exist. In addition, they may lead to ambiguity in regards to what parental involvement programs and policies actually are able to accomplish (Educationalliance, 2010). Based on the above situation, this paper will review researches to check the impact of parent involvement at home and at school in their children schooling.
Literature review
Parental involvement programs are mostly crafted to be composed of several means of training and participations for parents to work with schools and teachers. Parent involvement normally begins with contacts (phone calls, visits) in which the teachers update parents on the student progress and seek parents assistance.
The second stage of parent participation involves home learning activities. Parents largely use the following methods to aid students learning. First, reading activities in which parents listen, correct, and praise their childrens reading; secondly, teacher advised discussions about television programs that parents and children watch together; and instructional techniques designed for parents to help with homework (Moles, 1982, P.45). Many of the surveys conducted in this area have indicated that both parents and teachers support increased parent involvement in their children education.
Although parent involvement is widely favored, it is faced by some challenges including: first, teachers and parents conflicting family commitments and time constraints. Others include parents and schools conflicting perception of learning priorities, teacher low expectations of parents efforts, parents inability to handle their students family problems, and finally, a history of negative communications between the home and school (Moles, 1982, P.45).
Parents involvement in their childrens education has always received much support with schools, teachers, and institutional systems coming up with programs and patterns for encouraging parents involvement in the education of their children.
After reviewing research findings, it was concluded that a joint and well organized effort by parents and teachers is very important to handling more successfully the problems of discipline, motivation, and the development of good work habits at home and in school by working with parents (Gallup, 1978).
Parent participation on students achievement is much encouraged at preschool. According to Bronfenbrenner (1974), having reviewed several of early intervention programs, it was concluded that the active involvement of family is very vital to the success of the programs, and it strengthens and helps to maintain the effects of school parent involvement programs.
Sometimes, there are mixed reactions to parent involvement in education, with schools and teachers tending to support some parental participation well, and at the same time not being contented with other parental participation. According to Williams (1981), after analyzing the evaluation of a variety of parent involvement by elementary teachers in a six state regional survey, it was concluded that the teachers were not very supportive about parent participation in curriculum development, instruction, or school governance.
Ideally, parent support was justified and at the same time enhanced through teachers assistance despite limitation of opportunities by schools for both to co-work effectively. In a similar study conducted on the same setup of the principals, Williams (1981) observed that principals valued parent involvement in childrens home learning for several reasons: it aids schools by strengthening school learning, and is within parents capabilities; but they also felt that parents lack adequate training to prepare them for an active role in childrens home learning.
Studies have been conducted to assess how poorly educated and low- income parents are affected in their parental involvement. Due to challenges faced by these parents, some schools have developed programs to aid them in assisting their children schooling.
For example, the Parent Plus program in Chicago brings such parents into the school one day a week to learn how they can help at home with current school work and expand their homemaking and community-related skills (Moles, 1982, P.46).
Further, to understand the impact of parents involvement at school and in the home learning for their children, this paper will look at research conducted by Sui-Chu and Willms in 1996 to check how parents supported their children school progress.
Chu and Willms got their data from the US National Educational Longitudinal Study (NELS) based on a sample of around 24600 8th grade students in a stratified sample drawn from 1500 schools, with the evidence being collected from student and parent questionnaires and was gauged using standardized attainment tests in mathematics and reading (Sui-Chu and Willms, 1996). The table below shows the items contained in the questionnaire.
Source: Sui-Chu and Willms. Web.
Reponses to the questionnaire items were scored and the scores analyzed to look for major patterns. A principal component analysis with varimax rotation identified four factors with Eigen values greater than 1. Four main factors were assessed to describe most parental involvement activity: two types of home involvement (home discussion of school activities and home supervision) and two types of school involvement (school communication and school participation).
Finally, the data was analyzed to check the relationship between forms of parental involvement and social class of the families. For analysis, multilevel regression analysis fit for hierarchical linear model (HLM) was used, as shown in the following section.
Findings
According to Sui-Chu and Willms (1996), the following results emerged from the study. First, there was a variance of 55 percent in the set of 12 variables ; intra-school involvement, rather than inter-school involvement was found to account for 90 % of the total variation, however, the distribution was relatively uniform across the schools ; and lastly, the level of parental involvement was directly proportional to the level of social class exhibited.
Source: Sui-Chu and Willms. Web.
Discussion
The results indicated that, levels of communication and levels of parental involvement in the home were relatively uniform across all schools, thus it was not possible to identify reliably, schools that were particularly effective or ineffective in culturing higher levels of parental involvement.
Most researchers argue that successful schools use practices that foster greater communication with parents, encourage parents to assist children at home with their schoolwork and planning, and take parents to act as volunteers or participants in school governance; all aimed at high level schooling outcomes (Sui-Chu and Willms, 1996, P.137).
These results therefore imply that these schools are more of ideal examples but they are very limited. The home-school communication collaboration may be hindered by parent cooperation, with many parents facing competing demands of work and family life, come from different cultural backgrounds, and feel mistrust and anxiety when dealing with school staff; while many teachers face competing demands at school and at home, are not trained on how to handle parents, and may experience hard times when relating with culturally different families (Moles, 1982, P.45).
Due to different priorities and perspectives of families and schools, concerns for ones own child compared with responsibility for group progress, mostly generate conflict over means of attaining common goals (Lightfoot, 1978).
Though social class seems to affect parental involvement, the overall measure of family background explained only about 10 percent of the variations in parental involvement across the four types of involvement; thus, these results do not support the notion that poor or uneducated families are not well involved in schooling of their children.
According to study carried out by Vellymalay (2010) to investigate the relationship between parents level of education and parental involvement in their childrens among the National Medium Tamil Schools in Malaysia, there were no significant differences found between parents education and level of parental involvement; the study found very small evidence linking parents with more education to high involvement.
However, these results may not agree with some studies such as the ones carried to determine whether environment can increase IQ scores. The study examined the IQs of African American children from impoverished environments who were adopted into middle class families (some white and some African American), with all of the families providing many social-educational opportunities for the adopted children. Researchers found that the IQs of the adopted children were as much as 10 points higher than IQs of African Americans raised in disadvantaged homes (Plotnik, & Kouyoumdjian, 2010, P.293).
Conclusion
In addressing the question of what are the impacts of parental involvement on the educational progress of the children, these results have clearly indicated that childrens academic achievement and the level to which the parents are involved in schools also depend on the intake characteristics of schools.
These results show that children scored much higher in mathematics and reading, when they attended schools with more social educational system (SES) and parental involvements. The research has also pointed out clearly that volunteering in participation has a double effect of improving the quality education and minimizing inequalities between social-class groups.
Therefore, it is up to school parents to create and forges ahead with meaningful parental involvement programs for the benefits of the students.
Reference List
Bronfenbrenner, U., 1974. Is Early Intervention Effective? A Report on Longitudinal Evaluation of Preschool Programs. Washington, DC: Department Of Health Education and Welfare.
Desforges, C., & Abouchaar, A., 2003. The Impact of Parental Involvement, Parental Support and Family Education on Pupil Achievement and Adjustment: A Literature Review. UK Department for Education and Skills. Research Report RR433. Web.
Educationalliance. 2010. Challenges regarding parental involvement research. Charleston: The Education Alliance. Web.
Gallup, G. H., 1978. The 10th Annual Gallup Poll of the Publics Attitudes toward the Public Schools. Phi Delta Kappan, Vol. 60, Pp 33-45.
Moles, O. C., 1982. Synthesis of Recent Research on Parent Participation in Childrens Education. Resource Information Service.
Nieto, S., 1996. Positive Perspectives on Parents and Families. Web.
Plotnik, R., & Kouyoumdjian, H., 2010. Introduction to Psychology. OH: Cengage Learning.
Sui-Chu, E. H., and Willms, J. D., 1996. Effects of Parental Involvement on Eighth-Grade Achievement. Sociology of Education, Vol 69, No.2, Pp 126-141. Web.
UK Department for Education and Skills. 2003. The Impact of Parental Involvement on Childrens Education. Web.
Vellymalay, S. K. N., 2010. Parental Involvement in Childrens Education: Does Parents Education Level Really Matters? School of Distance Education, Universiti Sains Malaysia. European Journal of Social Sciences, Volume 16, Issue 3.
Williams, D.L., 1981. Final Interim Report Southwest Parent Educational Resource Center. Austin, Texas: Southwest Educational Development Laboratory.
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