A New Framework for Understanding Parental Involvement: Setting the Stage for Academic Success

The Coleman Report posited that the inequality of educational opportunity appears to stem from the home itself and the cultural influences immediately surrounding the home. However, this line of inquiry assumes that school and home processes operate in isolation, which is often not the case. An exam...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:RSF : Russell Sage Foundation journal of the social sciences 2016-09, Vol.2 (5), p.186-201
Main Authors: Harris, Angel L, Robinson, Keith
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Academic achievement
Academic degrees
Children
Children & youth
Communities
Education
Educational attainment
Families & family life
Inequality
Neighborhoods
No Child Left Behind Act 2001-US
Parent participation
parental involvement
Parents
Parents & parenting
Part II. Looking to the Future
Policy making
Public schools
Quadrants
Researchers
School age children
Schools
Self esteem
Social classes
Students
Studies
Success
Teachers
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Summary:The Coleman Report posited that the inequality of educational opportunity appears to stem from the home itself and the cultural influences immediately surrounding the home. However, this line of inquiry assumes that school and home processes operate in isolation, which is often not the case. An example of how families and schools can reinforce one another is through parental involvement. Whereas some studies suggest that children have better achievement outcomes when their parents are involved in their education, other studies challenge the link between parental involvement and academic outcomes. One major reason for this lack of consensus among scholars is that parents' involvement has been measured differently across studies. Thus, scholars' disagreements about how parents should be involved and about which aspects of parental involvement are associated with improvements in children's academic outcomes have contributed to inconsistent findings. We argue that the mixed results observed in previous studies indicate that parental involvement does not operate through the typical channels posited by researchers, educators, and policymakers and that traditional measures of parental involvement fail to capture the fundamental ways in which parents help their children academically. We propose a framework of parental involvement that might provide some clarity on how parental involvement operates.
ISSN:2377-8253
2377-8261
DOI:10.7758/rsf.2016.2.5.09