Parental involvement and general cognitive ability as predictors of domain-specific academic achievement in early adolescence

The Need to Distinguish Between Quantity and Quality in Research on Parental Involvement: The Example of Parental Help With Homework

“…No effect was found for home-based involvement; however, in-depth analyses that examined different types of home-based involvement revealed that parental homework involvement was the only aspect that showed a negative association and thus cancelled out the positive effects of other activities at home. Based on these meta-analyses as well as on more recent studies (Fan & Williams, 2010;Karbach et al, 2013;M€ agi, Lerkkanen, Poikkeus, Rasku-Puttonenn, & Nurmi, 2011;Xu et al, 2010;You & Nguyen, 2011), it can be concluded that parental involvement has an effect on students' academic achievement. However, because the meta-analyses used different methods to combine the results and to calculate the effect sizes, it is hard to draw more specific conclusions.…”

“…(p. 330) Surprisingly, not much has changed since then. Jeynes (2003) wrote that parental involvement is "a vague term that can mean countless different things to different people" (p. 204), and very recently, Karbach, Gottschling, Spengler, Hegewald, and Spinath (2013) stated that "the term has been loosely applied to a variety of activities and the parental behavior subsumed under the construct of PI [parental involvement] has been very heterogeneous" (p. 44). It can be assumed that this variability has contributed to many of the diverse and oftentimes inconsistent findings regarding the effectiveness of parental involvement in improving students' academic achievement.…”

“…Whatever categorization researchers choose to use, the important thing is that they account for the multidimensional nature of parental involvement and measure each dimension separately. Although most studies have done so (Fan, 2001;Grolnick & Slowiaczek, 1994;Hill, 2008;Karbach et al, 2013;Shumow, 2010;Waanders, Mendez, & Downer, 2007;Wild & Remy, 2002;Xu, Kushner Benson, MudreyCamino, & Steiner, 2010), there are still studies that have collapsed very heterogeneous aspects of parental involvement into one global measure (e.g., Hawes & Plourde, 2005;Hill et al, 2004;Pelegrina, Garc ıa-Linares, & Casanovam, 2003).…”

“…We believe that our study can advance research on parental involvement by showing the importance of using multidimensional measures and carefully disentangling the different effects that parental involvement can have on children's academic development. Several more recent studies have already moved in this direction (e.g., Karbach et al, 2013;You & Nguyen, 2011), and it would be valuable to have more studies of this nature in educational research on parental involvement.…”

Teaching Macro Social Work through Experiential Learning: Student Reflections on Lessons Learned in Building School-Community Partnerships

“…Family engagement is one area in which a university partnership can be valuable. Family engagement is a central component of student achievement (Karbach, Gottschling, Spengler, Hegewald, & Spinath, 2013), but these initiatives are often difficult for schools to take on alone.…”