Running head: LANGUAGE ARTS ACHIEVEMENT 1 Parent Involvement and Family School Partnerships: A Meta Analysis Across Language Arts Achievement Outcomes
Parent involvement and family school partnerships have been shown to lead to positive effects on children's academic achievement. A meta analysis was conducted to synthesize the empirical literature on parent involvement and family school partnership interventions across children's language arts achievement outcomes. Using a multivariate regression model, 168 effect sizes within 45 studies published from 2001 2011 were included in the study from reference database searches, along with hand searches of journals and cited references. Type of intervention approach, type of community, socioeconomic status, child gender, and child age were assessed across two language arts achievement criteria of test scores and competence scores. Results failed to indicate a significant overall model fit; however, significant bivariate relations exist amongst each of the two outcome criteria with child age. Implications for educational practice and policy are presented. LANGUAGE ARTS ACHIEVEMENT 3 Parent Involvement and Family School Partnerships: A Meta Analysis Across Language Arts Achievement Outcomes Education researchers have long been interested in factors that influence child academic outcomes (Christenson Sheridan, 2001) Unequivocally, children benefit academically and socially when families are engaged in their education. Parents, teachers, education policy, and students themselves are particularly interested in factors that result in positive child academic outcomes to progress education as a whole. One such factor that is recurrent in the literature is parent involvement (Grolnick Slowiaczek, 1994; Reynolds, 2000) The perception that parental involvement leads to increased child academic success has resulted in an extant body of literature on the utility of parent involvement in the educational process of a child (Fan Chen, 2001) Another factor that appears in the literature influencing positive child academic outcomes is family school partnerships; however, compared to parental involvement approaches to increasing child academic achievement, family school partnerships do not appear in the literature until recently (Christenson Sheridan, 2001) The purpose of this paper then is to synthesize the research on parent involvement and family school partnership interventions across language arts achievement outcomes. Parent involvement is often the first source to improving a child's academic success because individual attention can be afforded to each child and children typically spend the most one on one time with a primary caregiver (i.e. parent) (Sui Chu Willms, 1996) Although the appeal of parent involvement as a mechanism to increase child academic success is still strong (Hill Tyson, 2009) there remains lack of a consistent theoretical framework for what type of parent involvement as well as how and why parents become involved. LANGUAGE ARTS ACHIEVEMENT 4 Epstein (2001) took the initiative to develop a theoretical framework for different types of parental involvement in schools. Six classifications for parent involvement in schools were formed: 1) assisting parents in child rearing skills, 2) school parent communication, 3) involving parents in school volunteer opportunities, 4) involving parents in home based learning, 5) involving parents in school decision making, and 6) involving parents in school community collaboration. Soon after the development of Epstein's theoretical framework, several different frameworks emerged (Mattingly, Prislin, McKenzie, Rodriguez, Kayzar, 2002) HooverDempsey and Sander (1995) were interested in why parents become involved. They developed a theoretical causal model of parent involvement decisions. They claimed parent involvement decisions are characterized by parents' construction of the parental role, parents' sense of selfefficacy for helping children succeed in school, and general opportunities and demands for parental involvement. There still remains a need to empirically assess the synthesized literature of how and why parents become involved. This popularity of parent involvement in the educational process led to several inconsistent types and definitions of parental involvement, therefore meta analyses were needed to succinctly and quantitatively summarize the literature on parent involvement. Family school partnerships are another mechanism through which positive child academic achievement outcomes are facilitated (Christenson Sheridan, 2001) Family school relations have been described as a safety net to promote children's learning and academic success (Shirvani, 2007) The literature on family school partnerships points to inconsistencies in its use and definition, similar to parental involvement approaches to increase child academic achievement (Bracey, 1996; Christenson Sheridan, 2001) For example, family school LANGUAGE ARTS ACHIEVEMENT 5 partnerships have been classified as one way phone calls between parents and teachers, parentteacher conferences, and parent teacher collaboration (Epstein, 2001; Shirvani, 2007) With an ever growing body of literature on inconsistent types of parent involvement and family school partnerships, it became necessary for researchers to conduct meta analyses to formally synthesize the literature (Orwin Vevea, 2009) Fan and Chen (2001) conducted a meta analysis to summarize the quantitative literature on parent involvement and child academic achievement. Specifically, they were interested in potential study features that have moderating effects on the relationship between parent involvement and child academic achievement. Two databases were accessed using 4 search terms to assess parent involvement on academic success. The authors coded parent involvement into 13 different indicator variables ranging from "time spent doing homework" to "values academic achievement" to "parents attend school functions" They also coded academic achievement into 3 general categories with specific subcategories: grades (further classified into math, reading, science, social studies, or overall) test score (math, reading, science, social studies, or music) and grade promotion and retention. They found a small to moderate relationship between parental involvement and child academic achievement, and concluded there is still a great deal of inconsistency in the empirical literature on parent involvement and academic achievement. Several studies on parental involvement and academic achievement assessed language arts achievement outcomes in order to attempt to alleviate some of the inconsistencies in child academic achievement indicators. A single case design study conducted by Taverne and Sheridan (1995) assessed parent involvement on child language arts achievement in the form of paired book reading. Participants were tested using the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test as a measure of language arts achievement. They concluded parent involvement increased paired LANGUAGE ARTS ACHIEVEMENT 6 book reading. Another study examined parent involvement as measured by interactive homework with children, and found that those in the experimental (i.e. interactive homework) condition made more correct inferences about the reading material than those in the control group (Bailey, 2006) Other studies on parent involvement and language arts achievement have identified covariates that may further influence the relationship parent involvement has an child academic success (Barnard, 2004; Sirin, 2005) Hill and Tyson (2009) conducted a meta analysis on parent involvement in 6 8 grades on academic achievement using grade point average as a proxy for achievement. The authors retrieved articles from 1985 2006 from 4 databases as well as hand searches of journals using 10 search terms. They included ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and gender as covariates, and found that parent involvement was significantly positively associated with child academic achievement over and above the covariates in the model. Jeynes (2003; 2005; 2007; 2012) has conducted several meta analyses on parent involvement and child standardized and unstandardized measures of language arts achievement, including various covariates. The author included socioeconomic status, ethnicity, gender, and urbanicity to control for the effects of different parent involvement interventions on child language arts achievement outcomes (i.e. language arts homework grades) Comparing different parent involvement interventions allowed the author to conclude the effect of various interventions on child outcomes. Future research should attempt to combine the effects of parental involvement interventions and family school partnership interventions on child academic outcomes. This author also found a considerable and consistent relationship between parent involvement and academic achievement among urban students, and then same relation holds when examined across gender and ethnicity (Jeynes, 2005; 2007) LANGUAGE ARTS ACHIEVEMENT 7 Few studies have linked family school partnership interventions to child outcomes (Christenson Sheridan, 2001) Shirvani (2007) conducted a study conceptualizing a familyschool partnership as a progress report between parents and teachers every 3 weeks. The author used a survey as a math achievement outcome, and results indicated student math achievement increased, parent attitudes were more positive toward success, and student conduct problems decreased. More family school partnership intervention studies are needed to fully capture the relation of child language arts achievement on family school partnerships. There is also a paucity in the literature of consistent indicators of child academic achievement (e.g. grades, test scores, and retention; Fan Chen, 2001; Hill Tyson, 2009) Thus, a meta analysis is needed to synthesize the empirical literature on parent involvement and family school partnerships across child academic achievement outcomes. Moreover, no such study has