While parents are encouraged to be involved in their child's schooling, results from a recent study suggests that 'most forms of parental involvement, like observing a child’s class, contacting a school about a child’s behavior, helping to decide a child’s high school courses, or helping a child with homework, do not improve student achievement. In some cases, they actually hinder it'.
While parental engagement has been seen as a key strategy to enhance student outcomes, the research shows otherwise:
'After comparing the average achievement of children whose parents regularly engage in each form of parental involvement to that of their counterparts whose parents do not, we found that most forms of parental involvement yielded no benefit to children’s test scores or grades, regardless of racial or ethnic background or socioeconomic standing.'
'In fact, there were more instances in which children had higher levels of achievement when their parents were less involved than there were among those whose parents were more involved.'
And when it comes to homework the study showed some very unexpected results. Where many parents see themselves as having an important role in supporting their child to do homework the study showed that:
'Most parents appear to be ineffective at helping their children with homework. Even more surprising to us was that when parents regularly helped with homework, kids usually performed worse.' opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/04/12/parental-involvement-is-overrated/?_php=true&_type=blogs...
Maybe it is time for more parents to stand back.
What do you think?
It is proposed that parents should become less involved with their child's school life