Engaging Parents of 8th Grade Students in Parent/Teacher Bidirectional Communication

AbstractThis article describes the development and evaluation of a classroom-based, low-cost intervention to increase parents' involvement in their children's education. In Phase 1 of the study, 17 parents of 8^sup th^ grade students in a low-income, high immigrant and minority school district were interviewed to conduct a qualitative assessment of factors related to at-home and at-school parent involvement and to assess the feasibility and acceptability of the planned intervention. In Phase 2 of the study, 192 students in nine 8^sup th^ grade English classes were given weekly homework for seven weeks that required parent-child interaction to complete the assignment. Three of these classes were randomly selected to receive teacher outreach to initiate parent-teacher bidirectional communication with students' parents. The main hypothesis was that teachers would have bidirectional conversations of at least five minutes duration with a greater proportion of intervention class parents than with control class parents. Additional hypotheses were that intervention class students would submit more homework assignments and have higher homework grades than control class students. These hypotheses were confirmed by chi-square analysis, p Key Words: parent involvement, middle school, junior high, teachers, communication, interactive homework, role construction, self-efficacy, classroom, minority, immigrant, outreach, families, engagementIntroductionThe purpose of this study was to develop and evaluate a low-cost intervention to promote effective parent involvement among parents of 8th grade students in a low-resource, high immigrant and minority population school district. Many studies and reviews of the literature report that increased parent involvement is associated with improved student achievement (Epstein et al., 2009; Gutman & Midgley, 2000; Henderson & Mapp, 2002; Henderson, Mapp, Johnson, & Davies, 2007; Hill & Tyson, 2009; Jeynes, 2005; Simons-Morton & Crump, 2003). A study by Parcel and Dufur (2001) of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth found that parent-teacher communication was positively associated with increased reading scores among children in Grades 1-8. These studies argue that there is a preponderance of evidence showing that increased parent involvement will result in improved student achievement. A second position agrees that there is a correlation, but argues that the hypothesis that parent involvement causally promotes student achievement has not been adequately supported by rigorous quantitative research (Agronick, Clark, O'Donnell, & Stueve, 2009; Fan & Chen, 2001; Mattingly, Prislin, McKenzie, Rodriguez, & Kayzar, 2002). However, the debate over whether the relationship between increased parent involvement and student achievement is causal or merely correlational is a moot point for educators of underachieving students if it is not possible to bring about an increase in parent involvement. Figure 1 illustrates the pathway by which programs to increase parent involvement are thought to improve student achievement.The experimental design study presented in this article primarily addresses the relationship between 1 and 2 in Figure 1, not the more widely researched and debated relationship between 2 and 3. The primary aim was to examine the effect of a classroom-level intervention on one type of parent involvement, and the secondary aim was to evaluate the intervention's effect on homework submissions as a limited measure of improved student achievement. Although strategies for increasing parent involvement have been published (Henderson et al., 2007; Epstein et al., 2009), there has been little quantitative evaluation of these approaches. …