Family and Consumer SciencesResearch Review
College of Agriculture, Life Sciences and Natural Resources
Parental Involvement in Schools: Parent and Teacher Perceptions of Roles, Efficacy,
and Opportunities
Gettinger, Maribeth and Waters-Guetschow, Kristen. (1998). Parental Involvement in
Schools: Parent and Teacher Perceptions of Roles, Efficacy, and Opportunities. Journal of Research and Development in Education, 32(1), 38-52.
PURPOSE: Examined perceptions of roles, efficacy, and opportunities for parental involvement
in elementary, middle, and high schools.
LITERATURE REVIEW:
- Hoover-Dempsey & Sandler, (1995) concluded that parent participation significantly
benefits children’s learning and school performance. In addition, parent involvement
and participation in children’s education contributes to their perceptions of success
as parents.
- Epstein (1992, 1995) described several activities in which parents are involved in
enhancing their children’s education and found that involvement is most successful
when teachers and parents collectively endorse involvement and understand each other’s
preferences.
METHODS:
- Participants included 558 parents and 142 teachers representing six schools in three
districts of southern Wisconsin.
- Instruments: Two questionnaires, one for parents and the other for teachers assessed
background information (including educational attainment and race-ethnicity), overall
level of satisfaction with the children’s education, parents current level of involvement,
preferred level of involvement and perceived degree of effectiveness of parental involvement.
Another part of the questionnaire reflected parental involvement in specific activities
selected from the Educational Resource Information Center (including 32 reports of
empirical studies and 18 advocacy articles). A third part, Barrier Scale, was designed
to determine potential opportunities and possible barriers to parent involvement.
Finally, individuals were asked to respond to questions at the conclusion of survey
such as general comments and ideas that would facilitate parental involvement.
- Procedure: Cronbach alpha coefficients were calculated to estimate total scale reliabilities
for the Role, Efficacy and Barrier Scales. To examine the relationship among efficacy,
barriers, and current level of involvement, Pearson correlations were calculated across
parents and teachers answers. As for the third part of the survey, responses were
transcribed verbatim and subjected to an informal analysis of content themes by having
two raters independently review them, generate groupings for responses, and determine
consensus on the content groupings.
RESULTS/CONCLUSIONS:
- Parents and teachers are consistent in rating ideal levels of parental involvement
higher than current levels.
- Enabling parents to be involved may require changes in how schools encourage parental
involvement, including more flexibility in options for participation, a shift away
from a traditional view of parental involvement that emphasizes volunteering in schools,
and stronger efforts to identify and build on family resources and strengths.
- Lack of time and work demands were cited by both parents and teachers as the most
frequent challenges to parental involvement.
- More effective communication between parents and teachers about multiple and diverse
opportunities for parent involvement is needed.
Developed by Rose Foster for UW honors course, HP4152, Spring 1999
