“Questioning Parental Involvement”

Questioning Parental Involvement is an excellent short post by Walt Gardner at Education Week.

He provides some very good critiques of a new book and research about parent involvement that I posted about a few days ago — New Book & Research On Parent Involvement, & It’s Potentially Very Unhelpful.

Here’s an excerpt from his post:

Yet I wonder if using test scores as the primary basis for the study’s counterintuitive conclusion is misleading. Test scores certainly matter, but they do not allow valid inferences to be made about non-cognitive outcomes, which are every bit as important in the final analysis. For example, students may not perform well on standardized tests for a particular subject and yet still retain a lifelong love of the subject because of the attitude instilled in them by their parents. Conversely, students can post impressive test scores for a particular subject and hate the subject because of the excessive meddling by their parents.

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