There exists a growing body of research highlighting the important role that parents play in helping their children succeed in school. School involvement can take many forms and can provide long-term benefits of improved academic achievement and even better socioemotional development of children.
Prior research has noted the different levels of parental involvement based on family socioeconomic status. “Studies in this line of inquiry have sometimes found that parents from lower-SES backgrounds fail to be as involved as parents from more advantaged social milieux. However, it is not reasonable to expect all parents to be involved in the same manner because of their different access to resources” (p. 3).
The focus of this study was to determine “whether parental involvement benefits the achievement of students from lower- and higher-SES families differently” (p. 3).
The three central questions posed by this study are:
- What types of parental involvement have a significant relationship to academic achievement?
- Does a parent’s educational level play a moderating role between parental involvement and academic achievement?
- What subject areas are most impacted by parental involvement?
To answer these questions, the researchers conducted a meta-analysis of 98 studies published from 2000 to 2017 that assessed 806,359 K-12 students. Variables of interest included academic outcomes for K-12 students (math, science, languages, or a combination), types of parental involvement, and parental education level (which served as a proxy for socioeconomic status).
There are many ways that parents can be involved in their child’s education. For this study, parental involvement was grouped into three broad categories: home-based involvement (e.g., supervising homework completion, discussing school and learning, reading together); school-based involvement (e.g., communicating with the teacher, attending school activities); and subtle forms of involvement (e.g. transmitting values about school and academic expectations).
Key Findings:
- “All students, regardless of their parents’ education, benefited from many aspects of parental involvement, such as parental academic expectations, parent-child academic discussions, parent-child reading, and parental participation in school activities” (p. 19).
- Parental communication with teachers and participation in school activities were also significant.
- More subtle indicators also achieved significance including transmitting values about the importance of education and expectations for academic achievement.
- Not all types of parental involvement were necessary to enhance children’s academic achievement. “Children of less-educated parents can benefit from higher levels of parental academic expectations (as the results from the present study suggest) via perhaps more home-based than school-based involvement” (p. 20).
- For more educated parents, their assistance with linguistic subjects was more beneficial to their children than for other subjects (for example, math).
Why might parental educational level influence the types of parent involvement that are most beneficial? The authors explained: “highly educated parents…are able to use their proximal knowledge of the education system (rules of the game) to prepare their children for learning…and are more acquainted with teachers’ expectations in schools” (p. 23).
In conclusion, the authors noted: “results from the present study challenge the assumption that the benefits of all aspects of parental involvement are uniform across parents from different social milieux” (p. 25). Thus, parents with more limited resources can focus their efforts on the types of parental involvement that are most likely to benefit their children.
Citation: Tan, C. Y., Lyu, M., & Peng, B. (2020). Academic benefits from parental involvement are stratified by parental socioeconomic status: A meta-analysis. Parenting, 20(4), 241-287.
©Jennie Dilworth, Ph.D