Category Archives: research

New Report: “The Impact of Family Involvement on the Education of Children Ages 3 to 8”

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The Impact of Family Involvement on the Education of Children Ages 3 to 8 is a new report by a number of researchers, including Joyce Epstein.

Here’s how they describe it:

This report summarizes research conducted primarily over the past 10 years on how families’ involvement in children’s learning and development through activities at home and at school affects the literacy, mathematics, and social-emotional skills of children ages 3 to 8. A total of 95 studies of family involvement are reviewed. These include both descriptive, nonintervention studies of the actions families take at home and at school and intervention studies of practices that guide families to conduct activities that strengthen young children’s literacy and math learning. The family involvement research studies are divided into four categories:

Learning activities at home, including those that parents engage in to promote their child’s literacy and/or math skills outside school

Family involvement at school, including the actions and interactions that families have while in the school building

School outreach to engage families, including the strategies that schools and teachers use to engage families and make them feel welcome

Supportive parenting activities, including the nature and quality of the parent-child relationship and home environment, rule-setting, and caring behaviors

“Is Parent Involvement Really a Waste of Time?” – Excellent Response to “Broken Compass”

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Is Parent Involvement Really a Waste of Time? Recent Polemic versus the Research Record by Mai Miksic is an excellent response to the authors of the Broken Compass book. It was published by the CUNY Institute For Education Policy.

Here’s an excerpt:

“The weak empirical basis of Robinson and Harris’ book means it cannot in any way challenge the decades’ worth of research that has shown positive effects.”

I’m adding it to The Best Commentaries On The “Broken Compass” Parent Involvement Book.

The Best Commentaries On The “Broken Compass” Parent Involvement Book

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Don’t Help Your Kids With Their Homework is the title of an article that appeared a few weeks ago in The Atlantic.  It was written by Dana Goldstein.

It describes research shared in a new book, The Broken Compass:Parental Involvement With Children’s Education by two professors which, at least according to Dana Goldstein, questions most the effectiveness of what most of us would typically consider parent involvement/engagement. Based on what The Atlantic article says, this new research apparently disproves most of what you’ll find at “The Best Research Available On Parent Engagement.”

I’m not convinced that everybody else is wrong and these professors are right, but I’ve ordered the book to see for myself what they have found.

The authors followed that up with a guest column in The New York Times with the decidedly unhelpful headline, Parental Involvement Is Overrated.

I’ll be writing my own thoughts on it as soon as I finish reading the books but, in the meantime, here are a few other commentaries written by others:

Inflated Research Claims Can Harm Children: Why “parental involvement” is not a “broken compass.” is a post by Marilyn Price-Mitchell that is also skeptical.

And respected parent engagement expert Karen Mapp recently sent out this tweet:

 

Speaking of tweets, here’s one sent out by researcher/author Alfie Kohn:

 

Correlation does not imply causation (parental involvement edition) is from Simply Statistics.

The New York Times published three letters to the editor on the infamous “Broken Compass” parent involvement op-ed and book.

The first one is good and the second one, by parenting researcher and professor Wendy Grolnick, is excellent.

Is Parent Involvement Really a Waste of Time? Recent Polemic versus the Research Record by Mai Miksic is an excellent response to the authors of the Broken Compass book. It was published by the CUNY Institute For Education Policy.

Here’s an excerpt:

“The weak empirical basis of Robinson and Harris’ book means it cannot in any way challenge the decades’ worth of research that has shown positive effects.”

NEA Today had an excellent article on the now infamous “Broken Compass” book questioning the value of parent involvement.

It quotes Anne Henderson, probably THE parent engagement/involvement expert in the United States.

Here’s a portion of what she had to say:

Anne T. Henderson, a senior consultant at the Annenberg Institute for School Reform and a leading expert on the relationship between families and schools, agrees and says Robinson and Harris draw upon a limited body of federal survey data to cobble together some rather expansive and faulty conclusions.

While she sees some value in pointing out some of the drawbacks of “garden variety” forms of parental engagement, Henderson cites numerous weaknesses in Robinson’s and Harris’ work, including the absence of any new data collected by the authors, the lack of proper context to a lot of the data (especially around the information provided by parents about their school-related activities) and the obviously flawed use of student test scores as the only measure of success.

Henderson also points out that much of Robinson’s and Harris’ works fails to take into account that correlation does not equal causation.

“What very well may be happening is that parents of kids who are struggling are the parents who are trying to help their kids with homework,” Henderson explains. “So it’s not necessarily the case that the parents’ help is causing the kids to do worse, it’s the fact that the kids are doing poorly that has triggered the parents to help.”

Parental involvement overrated? Don’t buy it is a very, very impressive response to the “Broken Compass” authors dismissal of most types of parent involvement.

It’s written by three college professors — By Todd Rogers, Lucas Coffman and Peter Bergman — and appeared on the CNN website.

I can’t emphasize enough that people should read the entire post, but here’s an excerpt:

Citing their research, the authors of the Times piece, Keith Robinson and Angel L. Harris, describe provocative findings that show that students of parents who are very involved in their children’s education perform worse than students of parents who are less involved.

While the authors control for certain variables, their research only implies there is a relationship between parental involvement and student performance. This caveat is important; the existence of a relationship does not tell us what causes what.

Think of it this way: If you had two children, and one was getting A’s and the other C’s, which of them would you help more? The C student. An outsider, noticing that you’ve spent the school year helping only one of your children, might infer that parental help caused that child to earn lower grades. This of course would not be the case, and inferring causation here would be a mistake.

Does Family Engagement Matter? is a response to the now infamous “Broken Compass” book questioning the usefulness of parent involvement.

It’s written by three of the top experts in the field – Karen L. Mapp, Anne T. Henderson, and Nancy E. Hill.

The School Community Journal is a must-read for anyone involved in parent engagement activities, and you can access the new issue online here. I’m particularly impressed with Lee Shumow’s critique/review of the infamous Broken Compass book which leads off the issue.

Jay P. Green, with whom I often disagree (but not this time!), has written an excellent review of the infamous “Broken Compass” book on parent involvement titled Wrong Diagnosis on Homework Help from Parents: Authors find correlation, mistake it for causation.

Here’s how he ends it:

After examining more than 300 pages of The Broken Compass with its dozens of regressions and charts, I know no more about the causal relationship between parental involvement and academic progress than I did before. If the purpose of The Broken Compass were simply to raise questions about this inverse correlation, it might be a fine book. But when the authors and unthinking reporters use it to recommend that parents stop helping kids with homework, they are being irresponsible, no less so than advising sick people to avoid hospitals because they tend to kill you.

I’ll be adding more to this list.

And I’ll be adding this post to A Collection Of “The Best…” Lists On Parent Engagement.

New Book & Research On Parent Involvement, & It’s Potentially Very Unhelpful

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Don’t Help Your Kids With Their Homework is the title of an article in The Atlantic by Dana Goldstein.

It describes research shared in a new book, The Broken Compass:Parental Involvement With Children’s Education by two professors which, at least according to Dana Goldstein, questions most the effectiveness of what most of us would typically consider parent involvement/engagement. Based on what The Atlantic article says, this new research apparently disproves most of what you’ll find at “The Best Research Available On Parent Engagement.”

I’m not convinced that everybody else is wrong and these professors are right, but I’ve just ordered the book to see for myself what they have found. I also recognized that a short article does not always provide the best summary of a full-length book. I’ll write a future post about my conclusions.

“Parental engagement in learning and schooling: Lessons from research”

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Parental engagement in learning and schooling: Lessons from research looks like a useful review of studies on the topic. It’s a report by the Australian Research Alliance for Children & Youth for the Family-School and Community Partnerships Bureau.

Thanks to Joe Mazza for the tip.

I’m adding it to “The Best Research Available On Parent Engagement.”

Surprise, Surprise — Study Finds That Positive Parenting Promotes Adolescent Brain Development

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Daniel Willingham recently sent a tweet about a new study titled Positive parenting predicts the development of adolescent brain structure: A longitudinal study.

It found that:

Parenting interventions may promote healthy adolescent brain development….In conclusion, we have found, for the first time, longitudinal effects of positive parenting on structural development of the brain during adolescence. Given that positive parenting has been found to be associated with increased positive adolescent outcomes, and resilience against negative adolescent outcomes, our results have implications for understanding the mechanisms underlying these relationships.

This doesn’t appear to be that big of a surprise to me. It is something that teachers might also want to keep in mind — if positive parenting has this kind of effect, perhaps positive teaching (using positive, not punitive, classroom management) might be a good idea, too.

Study: “Involved parents raise slimmer adults”

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Involved parents raise slimmer adults is the title of a report on new research. It’s an excerpt:

“One of the best safeguards against your children becoming overweight as adults is how involved you are with their lives,” says Cornell’s Brian Wansink, professor in the Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management and a leader of the team that used crowdsourcing to ask 532 adults, “Which childhood experiences and behaviors might predict slimness or obesity in adulthood?”

“What’s particularly amazing is how people have identified these childhood predictors of obesity that experts never thought about,” says Kirsten E. Bevelander, another report author, from The Netherlands’ Radboud University Behavioural Science Institute. “Things like bullying, number of friends and how often parents play outdoors with their children are significantly predictive of how much a child will weigh as an adult.”

“Playing with your children, talking about nutrition and simply spending time with them will make it more likely that your child becomes a slim adult,” adds Wansink, director of the Cornell Food and Brand Lab. “The bottom line for parents is: Spend a lot of time with your kids — it almost doesn’t matter what (activity) you do with them — just stay in their young lives.”

“The Power Of Parents” Is A Good New Report From Ed Source

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The Power Of Parents: Research underscores the impact of parent involvement in schools is a new accessible report from Ed Source (done in collaboration with New America Media.

It provides a well-written summary of a fair amount of parent involvement research, and is definitely one of the best overviews out there. It could have been THE best, but it was a little surprising to me that most of the research it cited (with a few exceptions) was ten years old or more. There have been a fair number of more recent studies (so many, in fact, that I have a lengthy collection to review for a chapter in an upcoming book), and their report could have been the best thing out there if they had incorporated more of them.

Nevertheless, it’s still an excellent piece of work, and I’m adding it to The Best Research Available On Parent Engagement and to The Best Overviews Of Parent Engagement.

This Looks Like A Useful Study: “Meta Analysis of the Studies of High Performing Family Literacy Programs”

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Meta Analysis of the Studies of High Performing Family Literacy Programs comes from Toyota Family Literacy Program Research Project, and it looks pretty useful.

Here’s a description:

The National Center for Families Learning (NCFL) announces the release of Toyota Family Literacy Program Research Project, a meta-analysis of high-performing family literacy programs in a variety of communities/cities across the U.S. NCFL invited seven cities that have shown exemplary development and implementation of Toyota Family Literacy Programs to participate in unique research projects. The research projects represent a culmination of data collected over the course of program implementation and identified positive outcomes related to the program itself, program participants, and program staff. The participating cities are located in Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, and Florida.

Through the research projects, NCFL sought to identify positive outcomes for parents and children, as well as for teachers and other program staff, as a result of family literacy programs. Data collection ranged from scores on standardized assessments and surveys to focus groups, personal interviews, or document review.

I’m adding it to “The Best Research Available On Parent Engagement.”

“Is Parental Input the Key to Healthy Student Eating Habits?”

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Is Parental Input the Key to Healthy Student Eating Habits? is a good explanation and analysis of a recent study that showed sending home “report cards” on student lunch eating habits caused them to eat healthier.

I just wonder, though, if instead of that, or “twinned” with such a report, some non-preachy lessons on the impact of good nutrition might be a less “behaviorist” way of improving student nutrition.

We want to have students want to eat healthier — even when report cards aren’t around….

What A Shocker: “Poor Rural Parents’ Problems Adversely Affect Their Children, Study Says”

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To what I imagine is no one’s surprise, a new study has found that Poor Rural Parents’ Problems Adversely Affect Their Children.

Even though it’s obvious to most of us that outside of classroom factors have the greatest impact on student learning, it’s unfortunate that educators seem to be often assigned 100% responsibility and, generally, blame…..

Really Interesting Follow-Up To Yesterday’s Post On Students Knowing Family Stories

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Yesterday, I published a post titled The Importance Of Telling “Family Stories.” In it, I discussed an article that reviewed a number of studies that found value in parents telling their children about family stories.

Today, The Washington Post wrote a more in-depth piece about one of those studies, and included a pretty useful “Do You Know” series of questions that teachers could easily give to students as an assignment. I love projects that require students asking their parents questions, and this one would be perfect.

I’m adding this info to “The Best Research Available On Parent Engagement.”

“Five Stereotypes About Poor Families And Education”

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“Five Stereotypes About Poor Families And Education” is a very useful excerpt from a new book by Paul Gorski that highlights some important research on parent engagement. It appears in Valerie Strauss’ blog at The Washington Post.

Here’s an excerpt:

There exist several common stereotypes about poor people in the U.S. that suggest that they are inattentive and, as a result, ineffective parents. Low-income parents or guardians who do not attend parent-teacher conferences can become targets of stereotyping—or worse, targets of blame—by those educators. According to Jervis (2006),

Judgments…can be self-reinforcing as ambiguous evidence is taken not only to be consistent with preexisting beliefs, but to confirm them. Logically, the latter is the case only when the evidence both fits with the belief and does not fit the competing ones. But people rarely probe the latter possibility as carefully as they should. (p. 651)

So, whereas a more well-to-do parent or guardian might be pardoned for missing structured opportunities for family involvement—she’s traveling for work—a low-income parent or guardian’s lack of this sort of involvement might be interpreted as additional evidence of disinterest in her or his child’s schooling (Pattereson, Hale, & Stessman, 2007).

I’m adding this info to “The Best Research Available On Parent Engagement.”

PBS Highlights L.A. “Parent College” – More Importantly, Talks About New Parent Involvement Study

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The PBS News Hour has just done a segment titled Parents study up on how to improve college prospects for their children. I’ve embedded the video below, and you can also read the transcript at this link. In addition, they published a blog post about it.

This “Parent College” sounds fine, though it does seem to have the same shortcomings of other parent academies that I’ve pointed out at My Best Posts On Parent “Academies” & “Universities.”

What I find most useful about the PBS report, though, was their discussing a recent study on parent engagement that was new to me. It’s called Does capital at home matter more than capital at school? Social capital effects on academic achievement and I’m adding it to “The Best Research Available On Parent Engagement.”

“Parent Involvement & Engagement In Head Start”

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NHSA Dialog, which is published by the National Head Start Association and the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, have recently published an issue entirely devoted to Parent Involvement and Engagement In Head Start.

It looks exhaustive — there’s so much there I can’t imagine there’s much more out there on the topic.

I’m adding it to The Best Resources On Pre-School Parent Engagement.

Chicago Program Emphasizes Quality Of Parent/Child Interaction Key To Growth, Not Increasing Quantity Of Vocabulary

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Is the power of parent talk enough to close the school readiness divide? is a very interesting article in the Hechinger Report about a home visit program in Chicago where parents are shown how they can interact with their children to enhance vocabulary growth.

What’s particularly striking is its focus on the quality of interaction — it doesn’t seem to try to just have parents add a lot of higher level words. Here’s an example:

“Instead of saying, ‘go put on your shoes,’ I can say, ‘Alright, it’s time to go. What else do you need? … That gives my child the chance to respond, and say, ‘shoes,’” said Newell, 25, who has a 4-year-old daughter and a 10-month-old son and works for a company providing recess supervision and after-school activities in Chicago Public Schools.

Kids to where recording devices so researchers and parents can review interactions, but it is only for one day.

This article is particularly significant in light of a massive effort in Providence, being funded by New York Mayor Bloomberg’s foundation, that seems to be approaching this issue in a different and more intrusive way (see Could Providence’s Word Counting Project Be A “Boondoggle” As Well As Being Creepy?).

The Chicago project also seems to recognize recent research that shows shows that its the quality, not quantity, of parent interaction that enhances cognitive development related to vocabulary.

New Study: “The Parenting Gap”

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The Brookings Institution reports on a new study titled The Parenting Gap.

It seems to have a fair amount of useful information, and I agree with a number of its observations and conclusions, including this one:

Current U.S. policy is slanted toward supplementing the efforts of parents, with programs such as Head Start, rather than building the skills of parents themselves.

However, its condescending tone and its focus on labeling parents as “weak” or “strong,” I suspect, is going to limit its impact.

I’d say its worth reading the entire report — if you can stomach its arrogance — and see if there are a few worthwhile nuggets….

Study On Parent Involvement In Middle School

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The Association for Middle Level Education has just published the results of a study by Darcy Hutchins on parent involvement in middle school.

It’s worth reading the results, but here’s Darcy’s description of the research:

My study collected data in eight middle schools in one Mid-Atlantic school district, referred to here as North Shore School District (NSSD). I selected this district because of its size, diverse student population, and an official parent involvement policy that requires that all schools establish effective practices to engage students’ families. The study asked: How can middle schools cultivate comprehensive and inclusive programs of partnership?