| Cheryl Littman
University of Chicago
An investigation of the effects of child- and school-centered parent involvement on student achievement: Implications for family interactions and school policy
FINAL REPORT:
Policy and practice aimed at promoting parent involvement receive a lot of attention from educators, researchers, legislators, and the public. As a result, schools, by choice and by mandate, are taking on greater responsibility for helping parents to support their children' s learning. However, efforts to increase parent involvement are constrained by two conditions. The first is that there is no consensus about what types of involvement are most effective for promoting children's achievement. The second is that schools, in general, have offered parents only limited opportunities for involvement, and that the types of opportunities available may not be those that have the greatest effect on children's achievement.
Research on parent involvement has conceptualized and measured the construct in a variety of ways, ranging from a single activity to more elaborate typologies that attempt to capture the multidimensional nature of the construct. Based on theories about the importance of parent-child interactions, I posit a typology that distinguishes between involvement activities that focus on the child (child-centered), and those that focus on the school (school-centered). Data collected from the base year 3rd grade cohort of Prospects: The Congressionally-Mandated Study of Educational Growth and Opportunity was analyzed to create measures of child-centered and school-centered involvement, as well as measures of school opportunities for these two types of involvement. Along with other Prospects data, the measures were used to investigate the relationships among child- and school-centered parent involvement, family background, school opportunities for parent involvement, and student achievement. Results show that even after controlling for family background, child-centered and school-centered involvement have a significant positive effect on 3rd graders' reading and math achievement. However, holding family context constant, child-centered involvement had three times the effect on reading achievement compared with school-centered involvement, while child- and school-centered involvement had an equal effect on math achievement. By fitting data to hierarchical linear models, this study found that more than 85% of the variance in both types of parent involvement is within schools and less than 20% was between schools. Family background explained 21% of the variance in child-centered involvement and 12% in school-centered involvement, while, surprisingly, none of the variance is explained by the measures of school opportunities for parent involvement. Along with other results, these findings imply that what schools currently do does not effect what parents do or that the measures of school opportunities for child- and school-centered involvement are not sensitive enough to capture the variation in policy and practice across schools.
Family SES has the strongest effect on both child- and school-centered involvement. Living in a two-parent family predicts higher school-centered involvement but not child-centered involvement, while having a working mother predicts significantly lower levels of both types. Racial/ethnic differences are most pronounced for Asian families; they have substantially lower levels of involvement than their counterparts in other racial/ethnic groups, in spite of higher levels of achievement. Hispanic families do not differ from white families with respect to either type of involvement though Hispanic 3rd graders perform significantly below their white peers on tests of achievement. These results suggest that child- and school-centered parent involvement may not operate the same way for all families.
Despite the need for better school-level measures of parent involvement, the results from this study have important implications for how parents and children interact and what schools can do to encourage the kinds of parent involvement that have the strongest effect on achievement. Though both types of involvement are likely to play a role in children's school success, the results of this study suggest that when schools help families engage in child-centered involvement, their efforts may have a greater benefit, particularly for increasing children's achievement in reading.
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