The finding about the importance of parents and their involvement with a child’s learning and schooling comes from the University of Plymouth in the U.K. Here researchers demonstrated that parental engagement has a positive effect. The implications are to find ways so that schools and early years institutions can aid parents so that parents can also contribute to their children’s overall learning.
The research demonstrates that with school-aged children, adopting a home-school partnership delivers greater success for a child’s ability to learn and also with achieving greater academic success.
To make such schemes work effectively, the study also showed that when education establishments seek to personalize communications about a child’s progress, and also make this accessible, then the chances of success are higher. In terms of greater accessibility one example cited was with schools making use of text messages to parents.
In particular the research demonstrated how family literacy interventions can help to increase younger children’s learning. The study also noted that summer reading programs can raise the standard of school-aged children’s learning.
The data used for the assessment was based on a review of international studies plus the output of a survey conduted with head teachers from 180 schools. These quantitative data points were completed with a selection of interviews conducted with school leaders and subject experts.
A further factor for consideration is with the actual activities delivered in or by schools which seek to promote and support parental engagement. A key factor is time – with parents putting aside sufficient time to spend with and engage with their children on learning related activities in the home.
In other research, the scholastic abilities of teachers can be improved by developing teacher incentive schemes. Researchers discovered that teacher incentive pay programs that come with regular feedback to the teacher help to make incentive programs more effective and these help to improve teaching practices.
