Parental involvement in children's education. Research Paper

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Parents’ involvement in students’ education
There has been a lot of research indicating the connection between a student’s educational achievement and the support they receive either from parents or teachers. The study by Cheung and Pomerantz concluded that the biggest factor towards a child’s success in school is the motivation they receive from their parents (820). Parental involvement is a term used to denote any form of support that a child receives from a guardian, a parent, or the family.
Consequently, the educational community has, for many years, investigated how and why parental involvement affects a student’s performance. More so, with the declining averages of student grades (Alliance for Excellent Education 1-2), it is critical for schools and educational practitioners to come up with programs that support increased responsibility on the part of the parent on the well-being and success of their children.
Background of the Problem
Most nations believe in the family unit and it is from here that a child is nurtured through the stages of human development. On the other hand, a school is the place a child enhances their cognitive development, is socialized and is molded into an individual that contributes to the community (Mahuro and Hungi 4). A community is the convergence of people notwithstanding their past or character. Hence, for a society to be productive and peaceful, individuals must interact with other people or situations throughout the development.
All individuals can at least be traced back to a family unit where parental involvement plays a big role in the individual’s growth (Mahuro, and Hungi 4). However, various cultures and societies have varying degrees of how much a parent is involved in a child’s development. Nonetheless, the parent can be involved in a child’s life through various activities: motivating educational success, guidance to help a child appreciate acceptable societal values and good citizenry, providing basic necessities, and overall home parenting (Rafiq et al. 209). In the case of enhancing educational success, parental involvement can be in the form of home-based learning activities such as reading and writing exercises, coaching, or helping with homework.
Alliance for Excellent Education released a report detailing the declining averages of academic performance of United States’ students as compared to students from other developed countries (1-2). This decline in student performance has seen various American presidents enact programs aimed at improving student well-being and performance. It has also created much interest from scholars who want to identify causative factors for the decline in student performance and proposed remedies to ‘right the ship’ (Antoine 5). Most of the research surrounding this phenomenon has tried to control for gender, sources of motivation (Tang et al. 3395), and various types of parental involvement to determine the pros and cons of various mitigating factors (Antoine 5). One thing all these studies have in common is the undeniable role that parents play in the achievement level of their children. It is agreed that an individual’s education begins at birth and the first six years of a child’s life are the most critical formative years (Antoine 2). Consequently, it is true to hold that the parent holds the key to a person’s future performance.
Parental Involvement
The term parental involvement has been a source of conflict among many scholars, hence a definition of the construct will help build some consensus. In spite of its intuitive meaning, the use and application of the term has been unclear and inconsistent in most discussions (Fan, and Chen 3). Grolnick and Slowiaczek in earlier research of parental involvement and student success defined the concept as the resources that a parent devotes to the child throughout the growth process (238). This definition was more inclusive than the present definitions which limit parental involvement to the specific activities undertaken to support a child’s educational progress (El Nokali et al. 989). More recently, studies have tried to limit their definition of parental involvement by focusing on specific actions of the parents so as to be able to find definitive claims.
For instance, studies looking at the association between parental involvement and student success have included other aspects such as socio-economic status, prior achievement, and ethnicity (Wilder 378). Researchers have acknowledged the importance of these factors, and discussions that have been able to control for these variables, although rare, have been praised as painting a more realistic picture of the inquiry (Wilder 378). Zellman and Waterman conducted a study with race, socio-economic background, and the child’s ability as control variables and concluded that the association between parental involvement and child reading scores was a positive one.
However, another study by Topor et al., which sought to define the correlation between parental involvement and student performance, has been criticized by scholars for its lack of viability. Topor et al. controlled for children’s intelligence and concluded that parental involvement positively impacted a child’s performance (183-197). This study, however, defined parental involvement from the perceptions of the teachers, that is, how the teachers viewed the parents’ attitudes affected children’s education, teachers and school (188). The study failed to investigate the parent’s involvement in school and at home, hence the invalidity of the claims. Similar issues were raised in the study done by Izzo et al. which sought to link parental involvement to student performance (817-839). The study was invalidated when previous student performance was controlled, and this made most of the established correlations insignificant.
Such inconsistencies highlight the need to definitively define complex phenomenon. Over the decades, various scholars have conducted meta-analyses to help alleviate some of the inconsistencies. These meta-analyses have proven that parental involvement positively impacts student performance. As will be illustrated in the succeeding section, the meta-analyses are all aligned, even though their findings are different.
Review of Meta-Analyses
The first significant meta-analysis was done by Fan and Chen, and it focused on a synthesis of literature investigating the empirical correlation between student performance and parental involvement (1-22). Fan and Chen focused on determining the strength of the relationship between the two concepts and relied on experimental studies that had a bivariate analysis. Only 25 studies were selected out of the myriad identified papers since there were the only ones that had sufficient data necessary for the construction of Pearson association coefficients between the two variables. Fan and Chen recognized the inconsistencies present in the definition of parental involvement and grouped the different definitions into broad categories (17). The categories included parental involvement in the form of school participation and contact, what children aspire in their educational journey, home supervision, and parent-child communication. Notably surprising, was the divergent definitions of student achievement across the studies selected in the meta-analysis, but Fan and Chen also managed to group the various definitions into broad dimensions (18). Fan and Chen opined that the connection between student performance and parental involvement should not be generalized across the various dimensions of student achievement or parental involvement definitions. Nonetheless, the relationship holds on all academic level achievements such as test score, grade...