Effects of parental involvement on eighth-grade achievement

The indicators of parental involvement in children's education vary considerably across studies, most of which treat parental involvement as a unidimensional construct. This study identified four dimensions of parental involvement and assessed the relationship of each dimension with parental background and academic achievement for a large representative sample of U.S. middle school students. The findings provide little support for the conjecture that parents with low socioeconomic status are less involved in their children's schooling than are parents with higher socioeconomic status. Furthermore, although schools varied somewhat in parental involvement associated with volunteering and attendance at meetings of parent-teacher organizations, they did not vary substantially in levels of involvement associated with home supervision, discussion of school-related activities, or parent-teacher communication. Yet the discussion of school-related activities at home had the strongest relationship with academic achievement. Parents' participation at school had a moderate effect on reading achievement, but a negligible effect on mathematics achievement.