Parental Involvement and Children Motivation
One big problem in education study is the longitudinal effect of explanatory factor is always ignored. One of the reasons is the requirements of longitudinal data hardly be met. As a large number of educational studies made used of cross-sectional data to make conclusion, there will be severe issue. For instance, the effect could be positive in one year, however, the effect become smaller and smaller and eventually becomes negative. This study investigated the longitudinal effect of parental supervision on students’ academic motivation for 3 years.
1 What is Parental Involvement?
Parent involvement is considered as one of the most influential factors in education researches. Parents choose specific forms of involvement in response to the specific requests for involvement from children and the school.
The indicators of parent involvement in education vary considerably across studies, most of which treat parental involvement as a unidimensional construct. Some other study identified four dimensions of parental involvement (Sui-Chu, 1996). Some early studies conceived parental involvement as involving parents in school activities; More recent studies have emphasized parents’ actions at home, such as discussing their children’s experiences at school and helping children with their schoolwork.
1.1 Relationship with Academic Achievement
One meta analysis of parental involvement and students’ academic achievement (Fan, 2001) suggest that the vast proportion of the literature in this area is qualitative and non-empirical. Among the empirical studies that have investigated the issue quantitatively, there appear to be considerable inconsistencies. The study indicates that a small to moderate, and piratically meaningful, relationship between parental involvement and academic achievement. Parental aspiration/expectation for children’s education achievement has the strongest relationship, whereas parental home supervision has the weakest relationship with students’ academic achievement. In addition, the relationship is stronger for global indicator (e.g. GPA) of academic achievement than a subject-specific indicator (e.g., math grade). Some other study also found that parents’ participation at school had a moderate effect on reading achievement, but a negligible effect on mathematics achievement.