Evidence that directly links parent involvement to increased child achievement remains modest, but these modest results are likely to be a reflection of the complexity of the relationship between families and schools. To obtain a clearer picture of the home-school relationship, it is essential to understand the mechanisms and processes that make up diverse parent involvement activities.
Qualitative research is well-suited to identify such processes.
In contrast, this paper examines a variety of alternative communication patterns that emerged in the School Transition Study as important mechanisms for parents and teachers to gain information and make decisions about children. These patterns, in contrast to activities such as parent-teacher conferences, are often less formal and arise out of situations specific to a particular child. This paper examines alternative communication patterns and their connection to children's successful pathways through middle childhood by considering their effects on proximal indicators of success in academic, social and developmental domains. Findings from quantitative parent and teacher measures administered to the larger study sample also are discussed, but are not central to our discussion because they mostly measured the formal and commonly offered forms of home-school communication which have frequently been examined in prior literature. The alternative communication patterns discussed here emerged primarily through the in-depth parent and teacher interviews.