Parental Involvement and Student Success: Article ReviewAlthough 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...

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…