Parental support roles in K-12 online learning differ from traditional schools. Since K-12 students typically have not developed the self-regulation skills necessary for academic engagement, parents partner with schools to provide the affective, behavioral, and cognitive engagement support necessary for academic success. Through 21 semistructured interviews with parents supporting K-12 students in varied online contexts, this study delineates how parents provided support in each of these dimensions of engagement. The participants felt that in online education, parents should take the primary responsibility for behavioral engagement support, and that teachers were primarily responsible for cognitive support. Parents believed they shared affective engagement responsibilities with teachers, but that teachers should make content more interesting and engaging while parents provided for the emotional needs of their student. The findings also describe additional parental support roles, including helping students move to an online school, increasing personal availability, leveraging resources, teaching themselves, and encouraging students to develop independent engagement skills. The themes reveal how parents strengthen both themselves and other community actors to ensure their students receive sufficient engagement support. Given the importance of parental support in K-12 online education and the inequity of parental support across online learners, online schools should consider how to provide targeted help to parents in their support roles, including assuming a dual-support role for both students and parents.

Understanding why and how parents participate in Mexican schools can inform the efforts of American principals and teachers in their work with Mexican newcomers or with the parents of Mexican-American students. The purpose of this study is to describe parent participation opportunities, attitudes, and practices in Mexico according to parents, teachers, and administrator. The study was carried out as a qualitative research of a case study using phenomenology as the approach to collecting data. Data collection had three facets: interviews, observations, and documents. Findings revealed that parent participation is active in the Mexican school studied. All stakeholders held high regard for parent involvement. Also, each group had a conceived boundary of responsibilities. Parent involvement varied within the conventional and nonconventional. Similar barriers to parent participation were expressed by the stakeholders in Mexico as are indicated in the literature review for the United States. The findings from the case study were used to offer ideas to the United States schools on how to involve Mexican immigrants parents in their children's education.

This dissertation study used Yosso’s (2005) concept for Community Cultural Wealth as a conceptual framework to explore the identities, lived experiences, and aspirations of ten mothers of color from Jackson Heights, Queens, N.Y., as it relates to the education of their children to inform culturally relevant education in New York City K-12 schools. The following research questions guided the study: 1. What educational aspirations do mothers of color have for their children? 2. How have the mothers’ lived experiences informed their decisions concerning the education of their children? 3. In what ways can the identities, lived experiences, and narratives/perspectives of mothers of color in Jackson Heights inform culturally relevant education policy, leadership, and practice? This study used qualitative methods (Few, Stephens, & Rouse-Arnett, 2003) and standpoint theory (Harding, 1991; Smith, 1974) to capture the identities, lived experiences, and aspirations of mothers of color, to recognize and mobilize experiences of inequity, injustice, and marginalization in the education of students of color. The inclusion and expansion of research that centers and reflects the points of view of mothers of color can create greater opportunities for school leaders and teachers committed to dismantling racial inequities in schools to increase their consciousness and improve their leadership and practice.

This study was conducted to obtain information from parents regarding why they do or do not participate in the education of their middle school children. The results of the study should serve as a resource to teachers and administrators who wish to increase parental participation. A total of 209 parents returned a completed questionnaire. The survey requested information regarding how many times they attended functions/activities during the first semester of the 1990-91 school year, and what their reasons were for attending; what functions/activities they did not attend and their reasons for not attending. Parents also were asked what kind of resources/activities they provided for their children at home and elsewhere. In addition, the instrument requested information that would be helpful in determining if there were observable differences when selected demographic variables (race, education and occupation) were considered; and, using a Likert scale, this instrument gathered information regarding parental expectations. / Ed. D.

This study was designed to examine the relationship of participation in the Chapter I Parent Center to four of the variables often associated with academic achievement namely: (1) the child's home environment; (2) parental attitude towards education; (3) the child's self-concept; and (4) the child's motivation to learn. In addition, the study examines the relationship between participation in the Chapter I Parent Center program and reading achievement. The basic objective of the parent involvement program was to refine parenting skills in order that parents become more effective as motivators in the academic development of their child. The subjects utilized for this study were three groups of 12 mothers each and their children who were enrolled in the Chapter I program. Data for the study were obtained from instruments administered to the children and from questionnaires given to their mothers. Reading achievement scores were obtained from the children's post SRA test results. The post test-only control group design was employed. The control group received no treatment. A one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) was used to compare groups in terms of their mean scores. It was hypothesized that following the treatment, parents in the experimental group and their children would score higher than control parents and their children on the instruments designed to measure the five variables. Administrators as well as teachers would benefit greatly from the findings to assist them in areas of concern regarding parent conferences, examining school policies, planning school spending, fostering improved home/school relationships through heightened parental awareness of school expectations, and ultimately improved student achievement. Experimental subjects scored significantly higher than the control subjects on only one of the five variables. Experimental parents scored significantly higher than control parents on the home environment measure. No significant differences were observed on the other variables. A further purpose of the study was to determine the relationship of participation in the Parent Center program to reading achievement. No significant difference was observed between participants and non-participants on the reading achievement measures. / Ed. D.

The 1986 Amendments to the Education of All Handicapped Children's Act (P.L. 99-457) require that the individual education plans for students ages three to five, "must include instruction for parents so that they can be active and knowledgeable in assisting in their child's progress" (U.S. House of Representatives Report, 99-860, p. 20). Expansion of special education services to preschool children, will require educators to increase their efforts to involve parents in the child's educational program. Because schools have traditionally focused on child needs, additional insights into the parent involvement process are needed to effectively implement broader-based models more likely to result in active parent involvement. The purpose of this study was to examine teacher and parent perspectives on involvement to better understand the involvement process. Teacher and parent interviews were conducted in a large well-developed public preschool program. The interviews, together with observations and program documents, were analyzed to gain a better understanding of involvement practices. The teachers interpreted the parents’ level of involvement according to how well they complied with teacher prescribed activities and teacher expectations. Parents rated as most involved were seen by the teachers as cooperating with child-level activities, expressing an interest in participating and providing positive feedback for teachers' efforts. However, parents identified as least involved were viewed as not initiating contact with the teacher or showing little interest in participating in program activities. Most teachers relied on positive feedback from the parents to continue their efforts with them and use it to define the relationship with them. The teachers attributed the variations in involvement to family characteristics and to their belief about the family's concern for the child's development. The meanings which the parents gave to the involvement practices were distinct for the least and most involved groups. How the parents conceptualized the child's development and their belief about their impact on it appeared to contribute to parents' perceptions about their role in the involvement process. These differences in role perception can explain their interactions with the teachers as well as their level of participation in activities. Levels of involvement can be further explained by the degree to which activities were relevant to a particular family's needs and the control they felt to act on their own behalf. The understandings gained from examining parent and teacher perspectives of the involvement process can help ensure effective involvement practices with families. / Ed. D.

Many American families are experiencing a high degree of stress. Without sufficient resources to counteract this stress, these families ultimately become dysfunctional. Not only do they find it difficult to function in the home setting, but they also find it difficult to function in other social contexts, such as the school community. It was hypothesized that family stress and insufficient resources can have a negative impact on home-school relations in general and parent involvement in particular. It was the purpose of this study to (a) assess the level of parent involvement of a group of Headstart parents, (b) assess the family stress level and resources of these parents; (c) determine if there is a relationship among stress, resources, and parent involvement, as well as to determine the effect race and family structure have on parent involvement; and (d) identify support resources to assist parents in coping with the stressful events in their lives. Fifty-three parents from a large, Virginia Headstart program were used in this study. Parental involvement was assessed by collecting data from Headstart records. In addition, parents were asked to respond to two inventories. These inventories-Family Inventory of Life Events (FILE) and Family Crisis Oriented Personal Scales (F-Copes)-were used to determine the stressful life events families faced while their children were enrolled in Headstart and to assess the resources available to these families for meeting the demands of these stressful events. The raw data from the parent involvement assessment and the inventories were analyzed using the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSSX). Specifically, descriptive statistics, simple and multiple regression, and analysis of variance were used to analyze the selected variables and the interrelationships between these variables. The results indicated that there is a negative relationship between stress and resources. Parents with fewer resources generally had higher stress levels. Family stress and resource levels had opposite effects on parent involvement. High stress levels were associated with low parent involvement, while high resource levels were associated with high parent involvement. Race and family structure had no effect on parent involvement for this sample. / Ed. D.

This dissertation consists of three empirical essays focused on understanding how informational and behavioral barriers influence human capital investments in developing countries. In particular, I study two key actors in education production – teachers and parents, and how their beliefs shape investments in child human capital with implications for student learning and inequality. Chapter 1 uses a field experiment with teachers in India to investigate the role and malleability of teachers’ beliefs. In many developing countries, teachers often perceive only a weak mapping between their effort and what students learn. I conduct an experimental evaluation of a psychosocial intervention in India that targets teachers’ beliefs about perceived control – self-beliefs about one’s ability to influence outcomes. I study the extent to which this intervention affects teachers’ beliefs, their effort in class, and their students’ academic performance. I devise a novel experimental task to elicit beliefs through revealed preference, about the relationship between their teaching effort and the performance of students in their classroom. I find that the intervention induced a 14% increase in teachers’ beliefs about their ability to increase learning, as measured by the revealed preference task. Treated teachers exert greater effort at the intensive margin, scoring higher on an index of classroom effort. They also spend more time grading student work and provide more detailed feedback to students. Finally, students taught by teachers in the treatment group learn more, scoring 0.09 SD higher in the end-of-year exams. These findings suggest that teacher beliefs can serve as a powerful lever for changing teaching practice and raising learning levels in developing countries. Chapter 2 studies the relationship between parental perceptions about children’s performance and parental investment in children’s human capital, and how this relationship evolves over the course of schooling. Using rich longitudinal data on investments, test scores, and parental assessments, I implement alternative specifications for the parental investment function that allow investment to depend on the entire history of lagged investment and inputs, account for past parental beliefs to circumvent reverse causality, and use household fixed effects to account for fixed characteristics at the household level. I find that compared to children with poor perceived performance, children with better perceived performance are up to 16 percentage points more likely to be enrolled in private as opposed to public schools, and receive up to 40% higher investment in schooling. This relationship intensifies as children progress from primary to secondary school. Results are robust across specifications, with evidence of complementarity between perceived ability and schooling. Within a household, parents’ behavior is reinforcing, with more spent on the child believed to be the better performer. These findings inform our understanding of parental investment response and intra-household allocation of human capital investment decisions. Chapter 3 (co-authored with Daniel Chen, Sultan Mehmood, and Shaheen Naseer) uses a field experiment to evaluate the impact of providing information about teacher value-added to public school teachers in Pakistan. We show that growth mindset training shifts teachers’ beliefs about the malleability of intelligence, and reduces stereotypes against first-generation learners and students from disadvantaged backgrounds. In contrast, exposure to narrative or empirical evidence about teacher value-added did not have statistically significant effects. We document patterns of teachers’beliefs in a resource-constrained setting and show that perceived returns to effort are increasing in parental education and past performance of students, indicating that teachers view these as complementary inputs for teaching.

No description available.

No description available.