The article I have chosen is, Parental involvement on student academic achievement: A meta-analysis (Castro et al., 2015) (“Parental involvement”). This article is a quantitative analysis investigating how parent involvement and academic achievement are linked. It examines the data from 37 studies across kindergarten, primary and secondary schools carried out between 2000 and 2013 to construct its findings.
The article, explains that parental involvement is vital for children to reach their academic potential. Furthermore, parental involvement is deeply intertwined with the student’s social, emotional and academic development.
Parental involvement is a multidimensional concept that is hard for meta-data analysis to fully capture and understand. The study highlights that social, cultural, and socio-economic contexts play a vital role in parental expectations which creates challenges in capturing the essence of parent involvement through a quantitative lens.
The research questions identified in the study are, as follows:
- What is the strength of the relationship between parental involvement and academic achievement?
- What are the potential characteristics of studies that moderate the effect of this relationship?
The results of the study found that the strongest connections between parental involvement and academic achievement were:
- when parents developed and maintained communication involving school activities and schoolwork;
- when the development of reading skills and habits were developed at home;
- when parents had high academic expectations for their children.
The study highlights that supervision and control of homework and parental attendance at school activities did not play a significant role in the students’ academic achievements. But it also states that if parents demonstrate positive beliefs, values, and attitudes towards school, their children are impacted in a similar way leading to higher academic achievement goals.
The article, “Parent involvement” resonates with me because I am interested in researching how technology could play a role in parent involvement. As this article points out, there is ample research on the positive impacts of parental involvement on a child’s education and well-being. With technology becoming an ever-increasing reality and dominating force in the world, it is essential that teachers and the education system use it to promote positive change in the education of students.
There are many initiatives that are happening in local schools around SD61 to promote parent involvement. On a provincial level, there has been attempts to understand the impact of initiative-based programs on parent involvement in schools (Hamlin & Flessa, 2018).
Joyce Epstein is a pioneer in the discussion around parent involvement in education and the different roles it can play. She created the six types of parent involvement in a student’s education(Epstein, 1992).
I am focusing on the communication aspect of her types of parent involvement. My goal is to explore and create an efficient, effective and engaging method for parents to be involved in a student’s progress and school activities. I believe that establishing a relationship between the parents and teachers is essential for progress to be made.
The need for relationships to be created between parents and teachers is vital for a healthy and evolving classroom environment for the students. A challenge that I often face is parents failing to receive important notices about school events and field trips that the students have misplaced or forgotten about. This creates anxiety for the student as they fear missing out on the event and creates stressful situations for the teacher who is expected to quickly fix the problem. Too often, I see elementary schools promoting parent involvement through newsletters, pamphlets and other archaic methods. These types of communication have their place, but I would like to implement tools that replace the daily agenda and are able to create an experience for the students and parents that are straight forward and engaging. There are many media platforms that could be utilized to achieve an increase of parent-teacher communication that could hopefully positively impact the students involved.
This impacts my professional practice on a daily basis. I encourage an open-door policy in my classroom, where I encourage parents to come in to the classroom to have open discussions about their child’s progress, needs, school activities or general updates.
At first, I have found parents to be apprehensive, but after dropping by a couple of times I have noticed that they start to feel confortable, and they realize that the best way to be part of their child’s education is to be actively involved and in touch with their teacher. Technology could play a role in fostering this relationship and promote student and parent involvement in unison with the teacher.
I realize that this is not possible for some parents. Many parents have long work days, live far away and are generally busy with a multitude of other demands on their time that are uncontrollable. This relates to what we have been talking about in class about social justice. Just because you do not have time or the opportunity to meet the teacher face-to-face on a regular basis does not mean that you are unengaged in your child’s education. This component of school could be mitigated using technology to enable parents and teachers to create a relationship and start an ongoing conversation about how, as a team, we can support the student’s growth in school.
One method that I have considered implementing in my classroom to encourage greater parent engagement is the use of programs such as FreshGrade and a class blog.
FreshGrade is a program that has tools to create digital assessment, grade books and digital portfolios. This would create a platform to engage parents by letting them follow the ongoing work their child is completing at school. As schools begin to fade out grades, digital portfolios create an opportunity for parents to be involved in their child’s learning and actively comment and encourage further learning.
Personally, I have seen FreshGrade mostly used at the primary level but as I dive deeper into assessment practices in the upper elementary grades, the general trend is less tests and more showcasing of learning and knowledge. FreshGrade could provide this and allow for parents to have direct examples of their child’s growth without having to rely on the crumpled work in their child’s backpack that never makes it to home.
Another idea that I would like to investigate is the implementation of a class blog. There are many teachers that employ this tool already to help with consistent communication between home and school. I like the idea of a blog because it opens up many opportunities to create interactions between the student and their parents and create a dialogue about what they are learning.
Inserting information about the weekly agenda/activates and posting different media options that the parents and students can view together to gain some prior knowledge before coming into class could create a rich dynamic in the classroom environment.
In my personal experience, I have seen a teacher put in trivia or a problem-solving question that parents and students investigate together. This simple task allows the parents to be directly invested and engaged in their child’s learning. Hopefully, through the process parents can start to identify their own child’s learning needs and be able to facilitate strategies at home to address these needs. This creates a triangle of learning together instead of the onus always being directed on the teacher.
There are many other platforms and blogs that address these issues and I am looking forward in exploring them further and continuing to investigate the ways learning can be brought into homes while creating a supportive and positive community of communication and learning.
Resources:
Castro, M., ExpĂłsito-Casas, E., LĂłpez-MartĂn, E., Lizasoain, L., Navarro-Asencio, E., & Gaviria, J. L. (2015). Parental involvement on student academic achievement: A meta-analysis. Educational Research Review, 14, 33–46. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.edurev.2015.01.002
Epstein, J. L. (1992). School and Family Partnerships. Report No. 6. Retrieved from https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED343715
Hamlin, D., & Flessa, J. (2018). Parental Involvement Initiatives: An Analysis. Educational Policy, 32(5), 697–727. https://doi.org/10.1177/0895904816673739
Photo Credit: Photo by Sandy Millar on Unsplash
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