The Relationship Between Parental Involvement and Student Success

Parental Involvement and Student Success: Article Review Although parental involvement is usually encouraged by schools, its precise effects upon student achievement remains controversial.

In the article, “A New Framework for Understanding Parental Involvement: Setting the Stage for Academic Success,” published in the RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, Harris and Robinson (2016) offer a new framework for understanding parental involvement to permit greater systematization in comparisons of studies; their framework is called stage setting, based upon the premise that, “Stage-setters create a life space—the parameters within which the actor’s performance occurs—that corresponds with the intended action” (Harris and Robinson, 2016, p.189).

This article reflects the focus of the journal, which is to solicit peer-reviewed articles from academics from fields across multiple disciplines in the social sciences. According to the journal’s published guidelines, all academics within all fields can submit research, and multidisciplinary studies which incorporate multiple fields of study—in this case psychology and education—are encouraged.

The authors’ particular cross-disciplinary study was motivated by the fact that some research studies have confirmed a strong correlation between academic achievement in school and high levels of parental involvement. The question as to why there is such a correlation remains more difficult to determine, the authors note. It may be that parental involvement enhances student success or simply that students who do well in school have other common, shared factors that enhance the likelihood of involvement (such as parents with high socio-economic status).

In the authors’ own review, “parental involvement was not related to achievement in more than half (53%) of the 1,556 associations between parental involvement and achievement,” contrary to expectations (Harris and Robinson, 2016, p.187). Again, this highlights common controversies within the social sciences in regards to determining accuracy in research. In this particular work, studies that did find a strong association between parental involvement and school success determined that the effect was enhanced in the primary grades.

But even then, comparison between studies was problematic, given what constituted parental involvement was not consistent between studies. For example, one theory is that parental involvement enhances vocabulary development because of greater sophistication of adult conversation; other theories suggest parental involvement provides social reinforcement that counterweight potentially negative peer socialization in school. Comparing academic parental assistance emphasized in some studies versus parental social presence is challenging. The stage setting model emphasizes factors within the home environment which lay the groundwork for academic success.

This begins with simply emphasizing that academic success is something desirable. While many parents may say this is the case, not all communicate this in a consistent fashion. Stage setting theory suggests that socio-economic status, while it may be helpful in fostering academic success, is only one component of achievement. For parents living under highly stressed conditions, creating the correct stage may be more challenging because of a lack of time, physical stressors, and fewer resources.

But it is still possible to create conditions to enable children to complete homework and seek out assistance with more challenging assignments according to the framework. A lack of stage setting also explains why some students, even if they may have involved parents, may not fully benefit from the involvement if parents do not make academics an important part of the child’s home routine. On the other hand, stage setting theory also allows the limits of parents to fully control the stage in which their children operates.

Studies indicate that tracking in schools can disproportionately limit children of color’s opportunities, even if they have similar educational abilities as their white counterparts; a lack of parental familiarity with the school system and institutional racism can have profound ramifications that are difficult.