Some Tips on Parent Training

How should we be asking parents to support us?

Most of our international school parents are keen to support their children’s achievement, and often ask us what they can do at home to best help their children learn. John Hattie, Professor of Education at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, has compiled a synthesis of research on a number of topics related to student achievement, including the kinds of parent involvement which have the highest effects on achievement.

Dr. Hattie’s work is a synthesis of meta-analyses (a meta- analysis is a synthesis of research in a particular area). When compiling a meta-analysis, researchers convert the data from each study into an “effect size,” in order to be able to compare results. Dr. Hattie takes the effect sizes generated in over 800 meta-analyses (representing more than 50,00 studies, involving many millions of students) and synthesizes them. Though care is needed in interpreting the results of this type of synthesis, it can certainly help us see some larger trends.

So what were the results of the synthesis? Overall, Dr. Hattie found very positive effects for parent involvement in learning, but the results depended very much on the type of involvement.

Hong and Ho (2005) found that parental aspirations were the most important influence on their children’s achievement; and that parental supervision, such as checking up on homework, and making rules about time spent watching television and going out with friends, had a generally negative effect on the aspirations the students. Rosenzweig (2000) found that supportive parenting had an extremely positive effect on achievement; that homework supervision had a positive, but negligible, effect; and that a controlling and disciplining parental style had a slight negative effect. Jeynes (2005) found that parental involvement was positively related to school grades, and that the best predictor of high achievement was parental expectations.

Overall, the following family variables seemed to relate negatively to achievement: external rewards; homework surveillance; and restrictions for bad grades. On the positive side, the higher the expectations of parents with regard to the child’s achievement, the higher the child’s own expectations tended to be, and this tended to correlate with higher actual achievement.

So what should we be advising parents to do? The clear message from the research is that high parental expectations can translate into high achievement. Parents need to expect their students to achieve, but need to be careful about the way these expectations are communicated to their children. They need to be communicated in a way that shows parent support and interest in what the child is doing at school and in particular, in a way that supports the student in taking responsibility for their own learning.

Though some of the results reported were contradictory, an overall pattern emerges, which suggests that overly controlling behaviors on the part of parents have a negative impact, over time, on student achievement. This is not surprising considering the findings that it is parent support for autonomous learning behaviors that seems to correlate with higher achievement over time. Too much control is hardly likely to achieve this.

Reference

Hattie, J. (2009) “The Contributions from the Home.” In Visible Learning: A Synthesis of over 800 Meta-Analyses Relating to Achievement, pp. 61-71. London: Routledge.

---

Please fill out the form below if you would like to post a comment on this article:

Nickname

(this will appear with your comments)

Email

Comments

---

Comments

There are currently no comments posted. Please post one via the form above.

MORE FROM

GORDON ELDRIDGE: LESSONS IN LEARNING