In comparing one public school to another, discussions frequently include talk concerning the socio economics of a school or district, which then leads to talk about the advantages that one socioeconomic setting has over another. Educators tend to agree that low academic achievement frequently associated with a low socioeconomic status is a…

This paper is an initial examination of the norm activities of what parents do at home to their adolescence school-going children and eventually how these factors contribute to their academic achievement. The notion that parental involvement was crucial to their children academic achievement and well being was reinvestigated by utilizing a…

Since 1975 active parent participation in all aspects of educational programming for students receiving special education services has been legally mandated, initially with the Education for All Handicapped Children Act (PL 94-142), then in 1990 with the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) (PL 102-119), and most recently with the…

Despite a historically unprecedented increase in advocacy for parental involvement in education in recent decades, parents continue to express dissatisfaction with their communication with teachers, while teachers continue to identify their interactions with parents as a source of tension and stress. While the practitioner literature recommends…

This qualitative research study was based on interviews with 17 persons who had traditional-age undergraduate students currently attending college. The purpose was to explore the parents' perception of the parent-student relationship regarding their degree of parental involvement with their college students' experiences and to explore if that…

Parental involvement has different interpretations and applications within the school and home settings. Traditional parental involvement involves such activities as an Open House, parent-teacher conferences, extracurricular activities, and teacher requests regarding academic, attendance, and discipline issues. Parental involvement also occurs…

An interview was conducted with each of four mothers to gain an understanding of their perceptions of the educational and behavioral history of their children leading up to placement in a residential facility that used aversive interventions, including contingent electric skin shock. Semistructured instruments were used to understand each family's…

A programme of parental engagement with school science is described, in which parents and their children take part in scientific debate and practical science lessons. Three sessions, in biology, chemistry and physics, of this ongoing programme are described, through which parents have been able to support their children by learning science with…

In this article, the authors offer small changes in home-school relationships that can make a big difference in family involvement in schools. The ideas they offer in this article are neither time-consuming nor terribly complex. Some ideas can easily be implemented by a single teacher, whereas others may be more efficiently completed by committees…

Family-centered practice encompasses a philosophy and a method of service delivery that underpins early intervention services and is considered "best practice" in fields concerned with optimal child development. The aim of this study was to gain a critical understanding of parental experiences of an early intervention service that professionals…

It is clear that family support for students' education is important, but it is also an aspect of educators' work that can be frustrating when repeated efforts to engage families do not seem to pay off in high levels of engagement. In this article, the author takes a few steps back and looks at some important topics related to family involvement.…

The study examines teachers' attitudes and experiences regarding home-school cooperation. Teachers constitute a powerful group in school compared with parents, and this relationship is interpreted through Bourdieu's concept of social field, as a power relation. The empirical analyses are based on a mixed-methods approach with survey and…

Early childhood professionals know that good fathering has a profound impact on children. Research confirms that when fathers are involved in the lives of their children, positive outcomes can be expected; when fathers are not involved in their children's lives, more negative outcomes can be seen. Fathers can play an integral role as attachment…

In this study, we predicted achievement based on a variety of school demographic and background variables and identified schools that had achievement profiles that exceeded or fell short of their expected achievement levels. We identified schools that were over- or underperforming and surveyed parents, teachers, and administrators in an effort to…

Multilevel models of data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten Cohort (N = 19,375) revealed that the negative association between family poverty and school-based parental involvement in education varied according to family and school factors targeted by large-scale policy interventions. Specifically, the association was weaker…