Professor A. Yerks
COMP 106
Parental Involvement in Education: A Summary of Scholarly Articles
The need for parental involvement in a child’s schooling is a vital part of the educational process. As educational standards have been raised in an era of high-stakes testing and the requirements of No Child Left Behind legislation, everyone involved in the educational process is working to find out what types of things aid in a successful school experience. One thing that everyone seems to agree on is that parental involvement is necessary in order to give a child the best odds of high academic achievement. School administrators, teachers, parents, and even the students themselves seem to realize that involved parents can make a difference in a child’s education. In this essay, three articles regarding different aspects of parent involvement in the educational process will be summarized.
In their article "Parental Involvement, Parenting Behaviors, and Children's Cognitive Development in Low-Income and Minority Families,” Mido Chang, Boyoung Park, Kusum Singh, and Yougnji Y. Sung assert that “encouraging positive parental involvement is especially important for children from low-income, ethnic-minority, and language-minority backgrounds (310).” Chang, Park, Kusum, Singh, and Sung claim that the positive effects of parental involvement in the academic achievement of their children is well-documented, and they studied data from Head Start programs, which aim to “increase parental involvement and parental skills so that parents can better stimulate their children's linguistic, cognitive, social, and emotional growth order to show the correlation that exists between parental involvement and children’s cognitive development”(310) in preschool age children, especially for low-income and minority families. The authors’ purpose lies in wanting to show that there is evidence that development in preschool children is also affected by parental behavior, in that although their formal education has not begun, their learning processes are well underway. Their study is convincing and relevant for those in the educational community, especially those involved in early childhood development and early elementary education, as would be the intended audience for an article appearing in The Journal of Childhood Education.
Erika A Patall, Harris Cooper, and Jorgianne Civey Robinson argue that parents can improve the “academic performance among elementary school children” (1039) by being “involved in their children’s homework” (1039), in their article “Parent Involvement in Homework: A Research Synthesis.” The authors found that parental involvement in their children’s homework can take many forms and claim that the involvement can “accelerate learning by increasing the amount of time students spend studying and making homework study more efficient, effective, and focused.” (1041) Patall, Cooper, and Robinson aim to pinpoint the strategies of parental involvement that achieve the best results for children and to discover how such parental involvement should change throughout the child’s educational experience. The authors provide a detailed analysis of the evidence and provide suggestions for the types of parental involvement that they found to be most effective, which is very beneficial for their intended audience of educators, who will be able to pass the research and tips on to the parents of their students.
Marya Grande, an assistant professor of special education at Canisius College asserts that schools need to find ways to teach parents what they need to do to help their children succeed in school and focuses on one such strategy in her article for Intervention in School and Clinic, entitled “Increasing Parent Participation and Knowledge Using Home Literacy Bags.” Grande details a low-cost program in which schools create “literacy bags” (120) to be sent home with each child in the first through third grades for at least one week of the school year in order to “make parents aware of grade-level expectations and activities, materials, and ideas that may help prepare all young learners to meet literacy standards” (120); and she claims that the program is very effective (125). Grande’s goal is to provide detailed methodology and anecdotal evidence about the literacy bag program, in order to provide a framework that can be adopted by other schools, especially in low-income minority districts, where parents are not always aware of the learning benchmarks that their children should be reaching at each grade level. To this end, Grande’s article is useful, informative, plainly written, and convincing, and should be well-received by anyone interested in finding new ways to help parents become more involved with their children’s learning.
In summarizing these three articles, I am able to clearly see that there are many aspects to be looked at when discussing parental involvement and education. I learned that not only is parental involvement necessary, but that there are certain skills and strategies parents must learn and use when it comes to their children’s education. I especially found the Head Start article interesting, because of the fact that it highlighted the need for parents to be involved in their children’s education even before they actually enter public school. In addition, I really enjoyed the article about the literacy bags. I found it so encouraging that a program that cost less than $1,000 to start up can have such an impact. Many times I think teachers assume the parents of their students are as interested in their education as the teacher’s parents were, but this is not always the case. I think the literacy bags could be an excellent tool in informing parents of the things that are expected from their child, and in teaching them ways to help their students in school.
These are just a few of the many, many articles that have been written regarding parental involvement in education. From studies proving the benefits of such involvement to tips on how schools can train parents to be involved and how parents can best help their children, the information is available and useful and should be looked at by anyone who is interested in providing students with the best odds for achieving academic success.
Works Cited
Chang, Mido, Park, Boyoung, Singh, Kusum, and Sung, Youngju Y. "Parental Involvement,
Parenting Behaviors, and Children's Cognitive Development in Low-Income and Minority Families." Journal of Research in Childhood Education 23.3 (2009): 309-324. Research Library. ProQuest. University of Michigan-Dearborn, Dearborn, MI. 26 Apr. 2009
Cooper, Harris, Patall, Erika A., Robinson, Jorgianne Civey. "Parent Involvement in
Homework: A Research Synthesis." Review of Educational Research 78.4 (2008): 1039-1101. Research Library. ProQuest. University of Michigan-Dearborn, Dearborn, MI. 26 Apr. 2009
Marya Grande. (2004). Increasing Parent Participation and Knowledge Using Home
Literacy Bags. Intervention in School and Clinic, 40(2), 120-126. Retrieved April 26, 2009, from Research Library database. (Document ID: 726730961).
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