Roles of Parents on Students’ Academic Achievement

What is a student?• A learner, or someone who attends an educational

institution (Wikipedia).

• In its widest use, student is used for anyone who is learning. They can be active learners, passive attendees, or disruptive troublemakers.

• In recent years, some researchers have studied students’ learning styles. Each person has dominant modes of learning and if teachers are aware of the range of individual variations and class profiles in learning styles, they can plan lessons to match dominant modes or the variety of learning styles.

• Students who know their style can adapt study patterns. Student strategies result in a variety of individual roles and a variety of labels such as drifters, planners, teacher’s pet, nobodies, brains, and popular. Whatever it is, parent’s play an important role in their children’s learning.

Values

• The value Orientation Method (VOM) provides a way to understand core cultural differences related to five basic human concerns, or orientations relating to human activities. The methid has been used widely in cross-cultural situations, including in higher education, health services and conflict resolution. The concept of the value orientation theory was created by Kluckhohn & Strodtbeck in 1961. According to Jandt (2004), these five categories are human nature orientation, activity orientation, time orientation, man-nature orientation and social relations.

Attitudes and Interests• According to Adebiyi (2006) attitudes are positive or

negative feelings that an individual holds about objects or ideas.

• In his own submission, King (1981) declared that attitudes are generally regarded as enduring though modifiable by experience and or persuasion and are also learnt rather than innate. He went further to say that achievement of any learner will to a great extent depend on his attitude towards the learning materials.

• According to Gardener & Lambert (1972), attitude could help the language learning process by changing student’s orientations towards particular linguistic cultural groups and there by modify their motivation to learn that language.

• Attitudes offer great possibilities for successful achievement in studies. They are an important motivator of behaviour and affect the achievement of the students.

• According to Crow & Crow (1979) a child’s attitude towards his work affects his worthwhileness in his activity.

• A child should be stimulated toward desirable activity through the arousal of interest in worthwhile projects.

• The attitude of the parents is important, in a child’s study habits. Good (1973) define the term study habits as: “The student’s way of study whether systematic, efficient or inefficient etc.”

• Good study habits are supposed to be the determinants of the academic performance. That is why efforts are made to develop and improve study habits in students.

• Ansari (1980) found that study habits and study attitudes are both significant variables which determine the academic performance of the students.

Parent’s involvement and student achievement

• When schools work together with families to support learning, children tend to succeed not just in school, but throughout life. In fact, the most accurate predictor of a student’s achievement in schools is not income or social status, but the extent to which that student’s family is able to:

Create a home environment that encourages learning;

Express high (but not unrealistic) expectations for their children’s achievement and future careers;

Become involved in their children’s education at school and in the community.

Parents are enabled to play four key roles in their children’s learning:

1. Teachers.

2.Supporters.

3.Advocates.

4.Decision-makers.

• Handerson & Mapp (2002) have found that “parent and community involvement that is linked to student learning has a greater effect on achievement than more general forms of involvement.

• To be effective, the form of involvement should be focused on improving achievement and be designed to engage families and students in developing specific knowledge and skills” (p.38).

This is a comprehensive framework for parent involvement and professional development called AYP.

Set the climateParents should set the climate for learning at home and establish routines for children around schoolwork. Parents should also be a learner role model and provide the tools that the child needs to read, write, and do homework.

Communication Communication with family should be regular, two-way, purposeful and effective. It should be conversational as well as provide information.

Develop RelationshipAs parents, they should take advantage of parent-child activities and practice parent-child responsive strategies.

Provide information and strategiesParents should go for parent workshops available at schools and seek out new ways to engage your child in learning; share new things that they have learned with their children.

Engage in learningParents provide a supportive home learning environment to promote student’s success.

Develop leaders & mentorsAs parents, they can mentor other parents to help them support their children’s learning and can be a model for the child the importance of being a leader.

Family Background and Parental Involvement

• Parenting styles and parental expectations play vital roles in setting the child’s educational plan.

• Guidelines about what children do in their free time give the child structure and helps the child set goals (Dornsbusch and Ritter, 1992; Less, Dereck, and Smith, 1991). The social and financial resources are what shape parental involvement, their opportunities to be involved, and their own orientation toward education.

• Some factors in the home environment that influence student achievement include social class of family, early home environment, parenting style, “type” of mother-child interaction, effect of the mother working, parent involvement in school decisions and activities, family and student aspirations, and number of children in the family, the less time parents interact with each child.

1. Social Class background • Social class position can become a type of

“cultural capital” leading to different schooling experiences. The cultural capital of middle- and upper –class children- for instance, those with educated mothers (Rosenwig, 1994)- impart useful resources for educational experiences, whereby that of lower classes provides resources do not (Lareau, 2000).

• Higher-class parents are active in taking part in their children’s education at home and at school, whereas lower-class parents do what the school ask but more.

• Similar educational values are held by both sets of parents, and the school treats them the same. Higher-class parents, however, have more “cultural capital,” which, if used, can be of benefit (Oaks and Wells, 2004).

• Parents, of higher-class students feel more comfortable with teachers and are more involved in school activities than parents of working-class children (Lareau, 1989).

• Middle class families tend to have more educational materials at home and they read a lot at home and score higher than lower-class students on reading achievement tests. (Entwisle and Alexander, 1995); these are all activities that reinforce values of education and supplement learning.

2. Parenting Styles• Parenting styles also affect student achievement.

Annette Lareau has described two-class-related approaches to child rearing: “concerted cultivation” and “accomplishment of natural growth” (2002, 2003).

• The concerted cultivation approach is more likely to be applied by parents. Working class parents of any race are more in favour of using the accomplishment of natural growth approach to child-rearing as this involves making available all that the child needs to become whomever they were destined to become, but with little parental direction.

3. Family Aspirations• Parents who set high standards and have high

aspirations for their children are more likely to have high-achieving children.

• From Coleman’s research in Equality of Educational Opportunity (the Coleman Report), the widest study done in the field of education proves that the effects of the home environment are more than the effects of the school programme on achievement.

• The most important factor is the school composition – the background of other children in the same.

• Another extensive study, by Christopher Jencks and others (1972), reached the same general conclusion: Family characteristics are the main variable in a student’s school environment. No matter the measure used, family SES is a powerful predictor of school performance.

4. Single-Parent Homes• Children from one-parent households have lower grades,

lower test-scores, and higher dropout rates on average than those from two-parent households; these results are also influenced by the race or ethnicity of the family, the educational level of the parent(s), and low level of involvement by the absence of the parent.

• Children living with single parents receive less parental encouragement and attention as opposed to those living with both parents.

• These children report lower educational expectations, less monitoring of school work, and overall less supervision than children form intact families (Astone and McLanahan, 1992, pp. 318-319).

5. The Role of Mothers

• Poor mothers are less likely to be involved in their childrens’ schooling because of discomfort with teachers and lack of social support (Thurston and Navarrett, 1996).

• Children who are left to make their own educational plans and decisions, where parents have little involvement, are more likely to be dropouts (Rumberger, 1990).

• However, single parents who do become involved in their children’s education can recompense for these problems (Pallas, 1989).

• Recent findings show mothers who work part-time tend to be more involved in their children’s education, and their children perform at a higher rate. (Muller, 1991; Duncan and Chase-Lansdale, 2000)

6. The Number of Siblings• Another variable that affects school

experience is the number of children in the family.

• Parents with smaller families offer their children greater intellectual and educational advantages. The more siblings in a family, the more diluted the parent’s attention and material resources (Blake, 1991), and the lower the achievement (Hanushek, 1992).

• Epstein (1987, 1992, 1994) suggested a widely recognized typology to account for different levels of parental involvement in their children’s education. In her early work, Epstein (1987) identified four types of parental involvement in schools:

i. basic obligations,ii. school-to-home communications, iii.parent involvement at school, andiv.parent involvement in learning activities at

home.

• More recently, Epstein (1992, 1994) expanded the typology and defined six levels (types) of school-related opportunities for parental involvement:

1. assisting parents in child-rearing skills, 2. school-parent communication, 3. involving parents in school volunteer opportunities, 4. involving parents in home-based learning, 5. involving parents in school decision-making, and 6. involving parents in school-community

collaborations.

• Epstein views this issue mainly from the perspectives of schools, and her research is usually concerned about what schools (teachers) can do to stimulate more active parental involvement.