Paper Example on Parental Involvement in a Child's Education

Introduction

Parental involvement in a child's education is one of the core indicators of academic achievement. Children whose parents are involved in their education at an early age show positive attitudes toward school, enhanced self-esteem, and improved academic achievement. For decades, the educational school system has been trying to increase parental involvement in school in order to improve the academic performance of students. Parental involvement has the focus of researchers, public debate, and policy formation (McNeal, 2014). Decades of research show that parental involvement is vital to a child's educational success and that when parents or guardians are involved in their children's education they demonstrate educational gains (Garbacz, Mcdowall, Schaughency, Sheridan, Welch, 2015). For example, with greater parental involvement students perform better in school, attend school on a daily basis, earn better grades, and have a better attitude toward school (Namok, Mido, Sunha &Thomas, 2015). More than these desired outcomes, a positive correlation exits between parental involvement and students' academic achievement regardless of family income, education level, or socio-economic background (Stacer & Perrucci, 2013). When parents show interest in their children's education their chances for success in school and life are likely to be improved. Parents can also gain skills and knowledge they need that will help them in child rearing.

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Statement of the Problem

The problem is parental involvement is a major issue public schools are facing today. Getting parents involved in their children's education appears to be a crucial factor for educators and administrators. Parental involvement is the key to student success. The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 stated that schools close the achievement gap by engaging parent. However, parents are often faced with challenges that hinder them from participating in their children's learning. For instance, insufficient time, busy schedule, language barriers, lack of communication, demands of other children at home, uncertainty of what to do, lack of support from family, community or school personnel are some of the barriers that many parents are faced with that preventing them from getting involved. (Harris & Robinson 2016) stated parents often felt isolated, alienated, and disengaged regarding interactions with school personnel at their children's school. For example, language is often a barrier to parental involvement. Schools are becoming more culturally and linguistically diverse and parents are often from different parts of the world speaking languages other than English making very difficult for teachers to communicate with parents. When parents cannot effectively communicate with the ones in charge of their child's education, parents withdraw from the school. Spanish is usually the more common language of many students in school and there are usually teachers who speak Spanish in the school. But there are lots of schools where students speak Chinese, Creole, and Arabic and it's extremely difficult to find a teacher who speaks these languages to help these students and parents (LaRocque, Kleiman, & Darling 2011). If parents are not involved there is a likelihood that children will not perform well in school because they are not adequately supported by their parents. Schools are required to involve parents, but educators are often lack knowledge and skills to build effective partnerships with parents. If educators want parents to be engage, schools need to help to identify solution to remove barriers to parental involvement. Parents are a valuable asset to improve academic achievement therefore; they need to be equipped with necessary tools to be active in their children's education.

Purpose of the Research

The purpose of this qualitative design research is to examine the relationship between parental involvement and their impact on student's academic achievement.

Research Questions

The following research questions will guide this research:

Q1: Does parental involvement contribute to student academic success in school?

Q2: What types of parental involvement that has an impact on students' academic performance?

Q3: What strategies can teachers, school administrators use to improve parental involvement?

Q4: What strategies do school leaders use to involve hard-to-reach parents?

Q5: What are the perceived barriers to parental involvement?

Qualitative Design

The most suitable qualitative design for this research will be ethnography. The main problem that arises, in this case, is poor performances by students. This is due to lack of involvement by most parents in their children's education system. The purpose of ethnography in this study is to help me, as the researcher to directly interact with the various target groups involved. It will be easy to gather information through observation of various students and their performances. Interviewing of the parents on how much concerned they are about their children's education, how much they provide resources required for their learning and also how often they follow up their children's school work. Learning of the various strategies put in place by various schools to enhance parent involvement in the education system will also be simple. It will also be easy to study the various programs put in place to train teachers and staffs on the value of parent involvement in school activities concerning their children.

The information gathered from all these sources will significantly help to compare various performances by different students. By analyzing the data gathered, it will be easy to conclude whether parent involvement in children's education has a significant impact on their achievements in school. This design will help the researcher experience the culture that applies to the target groups, and hence it is easy to acquire primary data on the issue, and thus the conclusions drawn from this method are more reliable. The findings can also be used to educate parents on the need for their involvement in the education system. This can be done by comparing achievements by those students whose parents are involved in their education and those students whose parents are rarely or never involved in their education.

Interview Questions

Why is a parent teacher partnership so important?

Why is it important for parents to be actively involved in their children's education?

Do you believe there is a connection between parent involvement and student achievement and success?

How can schools help parents with language barriers be actively involved in school?

What resources has your school provided to encourage parent involvement? How have you utilized those resources?

What would you suggest the school do to increase parental involvement in the school?

Does the school provide training for parents on developing routines, conditions environment that support their children's learning?

Does the school offer workshops and/or provide resourceful information to help families? understand how children learn?

Does the school provide productive professional developments that train teachers and staff on the value of parents and ways to encourage partnership between school and home?

In your opinion, how involved have the administrators been in building partnership between parent involvement and the school?

Interview Process

The participants that will be used for this study are administrators, teachers, and parents from the same school district. They will be interviewed using 10 open-ended questions that the researcher develops. Each participant will be interviewed for one hour. The mode of interviews will be conducted as informal. The interview will seek to have a total of 5 participants. The interview will consist of administrators, teachers, and parents. They will be interviewed in two 45 minute blocks within the same week. All participants' interviews will be recorded using audio and written notes and transcribed to notes. My role in the interview process will be where the researcher collects information as data and analyze them.