By Nguyen Thao Nguyen
The term “parental involvement” started to be used in the 1960s and 1970s in The United State and European countries for one educational program in which promoting ethnic minority parents to support their children’s home-based learning was the main purpose. From that time, since its beneficial effects, the term has received considerable critical attention. In this blog, we will go through its three main aspects: definition, benefits and implementation.
Parental involvement is very important for children’s learning development
What is parental involvement?
Parental involvement is defined as a commitment parents have made to foster optimum child development. In simple words, it is a support of parents by using their own resources such as time, skills, knowledge, energy. Parental involvement can take place at home and in school with different activities.
When children grow older, parents tend to reduce their involvement since they assume that their support is not crucial as it was when their children were in primary schools. Another reason is that they think teenagers desire more independence, consequently, thus, the level of involvement is declined. However, when growing up, children still need support from their parents and the benefits of the support are not changed according to their ages.
There are factors that might either hinder or promote the extent of parental involvement in children’s learning. Those factors are race, cultural values, socioeconomic backgrounds, parental education, employment status, and marital status of parents. For example, parents who have low-income tend to be less involved or parents who are immigrants attend less in school-based activities, or Latino parents reported higher involvement at school than African American parents.
Obstacles to parental involvements can be multiple aspects.
How does parental involvement benefit children's learning development?
According to studies regarding parental involvement, there are several benefits of parental involvement toward children’s development, especially formal learning. These can be categorized into four main benefits which are the development of self-efficacy, raise of learning motivation, improvement of academic performance, and increase of positive behaviors toward schooling.
Development of self-efficacy
In educational practices, there is evidence showing that parental involvement is beneficial to increase a strong, positive sense of efficacy for children regarding learning achievement by the use of direct and indirect experiences, verbal convincement, and emotional stimulations from parents. Self-efficacy is defined as people’s beliefs about their abilities to be successful when carrying out a particular task. The role of self-efficacy is to foster learners to start challenges and decide how much effort, persistence, and perseverance they put to solve those challenges, thus, a child who has a high sense of efficacy will be more successful and competent at school than their peers.
Development of self-efficacy
Increase of positive learning motivation
Motivation is a productive means which helps people actively think of strategies, take actions and put more effort to achieve their certain goals or desires. Parental involvement is defined as an encouragement given consciously by parents that are manifested by the parental endeavor to meet the learning needs of children. As a result of that, children are motivated to learn and improve themselves.
Increase of positive learning motivation
Improvement of academic performance
Improving learning performance is one of the important benefits of parental involvement. Indeed, parental involvement has the strongest connections with academic performance through its relations with children’s motivational qualities which are intentional actions, perceived competence, and self-regulation. These qualities together contribute to the learning improvement of children. Furthermore, when parents engage more in their children’s learning, teachers get influenced and then, pay more attention to the children.
Improvement of academic performance
Increase of positive behaviors
Additionally, parental involvement also increases positive manners for children toward their school. Parent-child conversations about school days might enhance academic achievement and reduce problematic behaviors. When children experience the care and enjoyment of their parents for their school, they might have a positive feeling toward their schooling. Also, parental involvement might convey to children the relevance of education, so that they could be more responsible and independent in school.
Increase of positive behaviors
What should parents do support their children's learning?
To make influences, parents are suggested to offer modelling, reinforcement, and instruction in order to develop the features of children’s academic success such as perspectives, knowledge, manners, and so on.
Modelling in parental involvement practices is expounded as school-related behaviors and attitudes. When observing parents, children acquire and emulate skills and behaviors from their parents. Modelling is more essential when children need to deal with learning tasks that are unfamiliar or challenging for them since under these situations, the requirement of learning from children is higher, the need for parental support is higher as well, consequently, they can learn from their parents easier.
Reinforcement occurs through aspects of learning at school from parents by giving their children interests, notices, compliments, and awards. The mechanism of reinforcement affects learning outcomes by helping maintain consequences of ongoing behavior patterns, therefore, learning behaviors of children can be grown-up when their expected consequences are reinforced frequently.
Parental Instructions include two kinds whose characteristic is either direct, closed-ended, or direct, open-ended (e.g., direct, close-ended question: Are trees important for human life?, direct, open-ended: Why do you think trees are important for human life?). The prior develops factual learning and knowledge of children, meanwhile, the latter focuses on cognition and abilities of children. Since instructional communication of parents towards their children consists of either simple questions or procedures related to the development of problem-solving competency and strategic understanding, its role is to boost the learning abilities of children and their assumption of accurate individual learning responsibility.
In practice, there are two main kinds of parental involvement: home-based and school-based involvement. Home-based involvement is manifested by creating a learning environment at home, monitoring and guiding children when they are doing homework, talking about school days, and so on. School-based involvement includes activities such as volunteering at school events, attending open houses, field trips, parent-teacher conferences. Through these activities, parents can model, reinforce and instruct their children on necessary skills, abilities as well as positive behaviors which can assist children to accomplish their learning goals.
In BiziVietnam, to maintain the mother tongue for Vietnamese kids born in Finland, Vietnamese classes are organized regularly. Being aware of the importance of parental involvement for children’s learning, we have tried to build up a good relationship between parents and teachers to exchange information related to learning needs, difficulties and improvements of children. We believe that when parents are encouraged by teachers, they will have more motivations as well as effective methods to get involved in their children’s learning. Moreover, every month, BiziVietnam will develop learning materials to help parents have different tools to learn with their children at home so that parental involvement would be enhanced and eventually, children will be facilitated to reach their learning goals in future.
As a parent, following information provided, what will you do to support your children’s learning? And if you are not Finnish, how do you get involved in your children’s mother-tongue learning?
References
Alfiansyah, H. R. (2019). THE ROLE OF PARENTAL INVOLVEMENT TOWARDS THE STUDENTS’ LEARNING MOTIVATION. Lentera Pendidikan : Jurnal Ilmu Tarbiyah Dan Keguruan, 22(2), 276–283. https://doi.org/10.24252/lp.2019v22n2i9
Bulotsky-Shearer, R. J., Bouza, J., Bichay, K., Fernandez, V. A., & Gaona Hernandez, P. (2016). EXTENDING THE VALIDITY OF THE FAMILY INVOLVEMENT QUESTIONNAIRE-SHORT FORM FOR CULTURALLY AND LINGUISTICALLY DIVERSE FAMILIES FROM LOW-INCOME BACKGROUNDS: Validity of Family Involvement Questionnaire. Psychology in the Schools, 53(9), 911–925. https://doi.org/10.1002/pits.21953
DePlanty, J., Coulter-Kern, R., & Duchane, K. A. (n.d.). Perceptions of Parent Involvement in Academic Achievement. The Journal of Educational Research, 9.
Grolnick, W. S., & Slowiaczek, M. L. (n.d.). Parents^ Involvement in Children’s Schooling: A Multidimensional Conceptualization and Motivational Model. 17.
Hoover-Dempsey, K. V., & Sandler, H. M. (1997). Why do parents become involved in their children’s education? Review of Educational Research; Washington, 67(1), 3–42.
Hoover‐Dempsey, K. V., Walker, J. M. T., Sandler, H. M., Whetsel, D., Green, C. L., Wilkins, A. S., & Closson, K. (2005). Why Do Parents Become Involved? Research Findings and Implications. The Elementary School Journal, 106(2), 105–130. https://doi.org/10.1086/499194
About BiziVietnam
BiziVietnam is the first ever non-profit organisation in Finland dedicated to empowering cultural connections and strengthening the Vietnamese cultural footprint in locals, internationals and Vietnamese people in Finland; along with promoting cooperation opportunities between Finland and Vietnam. Follow us on Social Media for the latest news and upcoming events.