Parental Involvement in Computer Science Education and Computing Attitudes and Behaviours in the Home: Model and Scale Development

Abstract

This work is situated in research on Parental Involvement (PI) in Computer Science (CS) Education. While the importance of PI in children s education is well established, most parents have little experience in CS and struggle to facilitate the learning of a child in the area. If PI in CS Education is to happen, then we argue that parents need support and that understanding the current behaviours and attitudes toward CS in the family context is important to discerning the form that support should take. This article therefore describes the development of an instrument to identify factors relating to parental attitudes toward and motivation for PI in CS education. Relevant variables situated in the context of parental computing behaviours and attitudes in the home were identified using a literature review and expert focus group. These include computing usage, availability, confidence, and experience. To measure these variables, a survey instrument was developed and administered to a large sample of parents (n = 1228). Results of exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis confirm that the instrument measures five constructs, namely “Confidence,” measuring parental confidence levels with computing; “Attitude to PI”; “Motivation for PI”; and two types of “Usage”: Creation and Consumption. Results of Pearson correlation revealed significant positive relationships between confidence and both positive attitudes toward, and motivation for, PI, with linear regressions confirming that confidence was a significant predictor of both. Regression analysis also identified that creative usage was a predictor of positive attitudes to PI, and that programming experience was a predictor of attitude to, and motivation for, PI. These findings were further validated through triangulation with qualitative data from focus groups with the target population. We conclude that this understanding of the predictors of PI attitudes and motivation should inform the design of initiatives to address parental engagement in CS Education.