Joan M. T. Walker

Why Do Parents Become Involved? Research Findings and Implications.

A decade ago, Hoover‐Dempsey and Sandler offered a model of the parental involvement process that focused on understanding why parents become involved in their children’s education and how their involvement influences student outcomes. Since then, we and others have conducted conceptual and empirical work to enhance understanding of processes examined in the model. In this article (companion to Walker and colleagues’ article about scale development on the model in this issue), we review recent work on constructs central to the model’s initial question: Why do parents become involved in children’s education? Based on this review, we offer suggestions for (1) research that may deepen understanding of parents’ motivations for involvement and (2) school and family practices that may strengthen the incidence and effectiveness of parental involvement across varied school communities.

Parental Involvement: Model Revision through Scale Development

In 1995 and 1997 Hoover‐Dempsey and Sandler proposed a theoretical model of the parental involvement process. Taking a psychological perspective, the model explained why parents become involved in their children’s education and how their involvement makes a difference in student outcomes. In this article we describe our efforts to operationalize Hoover‐Dempsey and Sandler’s explanation and how, in turn, those efforts led to revisions in their theoretical model. Because investigations of the full model are ongoing, in this article we discuss only revisions in the original model’s first 2 levels, which focus on psychological and contextual contributors to forms of parent involvement. We conclude with a discussion of how our work exemplifies the reciprocal relation between theory and measurement and suggest how other researchers might use our scales to assess links between parents’ psychological motivations for involvement and their involvement behavior.

Teachers Involving Parents (TIP): results of an in-service teacher education program for enhancing parental involvement

Abstract Despite considerable theoretical and empirical work supporting the critical role of parents in students’ school success, pre-service teachers generally receive little preparation for involving parents. Responding to a need for in-service preparation, this paper reports on a program designed to enhance practicing teachers’ beliefs, skills, and strategies related to parental involvement. Results of an initial test of the program in two US public schools serving predominantly high-risk populations suggested that participation increased teachers’ sense of efficacy, and enhanced beliefs about parents’ efficacy for helping children learn as well as invitations to involvement. Results are discussed with reference to links between teacher beliefs and practices, diffusion of intervention effects within schools, directions for future research, and implications for the design and implementation of effective professional development programs.

Looking at Teacher Practices Through the Lens of Parenting Style

In this article, the author used a parenting style framework to explain mixed evidence about the influence of teacher practices on student outcomes. Participants included 3 fifth-grade math teachers and 45 of their students. The author assessed teacher practices, teaching style (i.e., demandingness and responsiveness), student engagement, self-efficacy, and standardized achievement test scores. The most academically and socially competent students were those who experienced an authoritative teaching style (i.e., consistent classroom management, support of student autonomy, and personal interest in students). The author found disengagement and limited ability beliefs in the authoritarian context (i.e., consistent classroom management but limited autonomy support and limited personal interest in students). She found smaller academic gains in the permissive context (i.e., inconsistent management, autonomy support, and interest in students).

Concept mapping applied to design

This paper covers an overview of the uses of concept mapping in a senior design course at Vanderbilt University. Concept maps have been used as a semi-quantitative measurement tool for evaluation of student understanding of the information content and interrelationships at three different points during a year long course. These maps may be compared with those generated by graduate students and the course instructor. Concept maps have also been used to assist students in the generation of contradiction maps for project design solution search methods. Concept maps are also being used to introduce chapter topics to classes, using and overview map to introduce the topic and a complete map at the end of the chapter to completely describe the contents and concepts of a given chapter. The effects of this mode of introduction and summarizing will be the topic of several years of classroom investigation.

This Issue: A Person-Centered Approach to Classroom Management

I N HIS WRITING ABOUT human growth and development, Carl Rogers, the founder of humanist psychology, offered a vision of what schools could be. At the time, his conception of learning—characterized as the pursuit of selfmotivated goals in the context of interpersonal relationships—ran counter to the thrall of behaviorist psychology and its more mechanistic view of human functioning. Considering the popularity of the behaviorist perspective, Rogers (1961) questioned the public’s willingness to oppose “the current trend toward education as drill in factual knowledge” (p. 287) and predicted that the pursuit of this goal would lead to the development of teaching machines that offered immediate rewards for right answers. He pondered how the two divergent viewpoints—humanism and behaviorism—could coexist: “Does [one approach] take the place of the [other], or is it supplemental to it?” (p. 287). Nearly 50 years later, it appears that Rogers’ query has been answered. A person-centered approach to education has been marginalized in U.S. public schools. And this depersonalization of learning is costing us in ways that we cannot yet fully appreciate. For example, American schools are hemorrhaging teaching talent. Nearly one-half of new teachers leave the profession within five years; rates of attrition are even higher for teachers working in urban settings (Ingersoll, 2003). Why are they leaving? The answers reflect an aversive and impersonal set of working conditions: lack of administrative support, low salaries, unreasonable time demands, and the pressure of high-stakes testing and accountability (Darling-Hammond & Sykes, 2003; Ingersoll, 2001). Tellingly, despite an increasingly narrow, standards-driven view of teacher as content specialist, teachers report that it is the frustration of their desires to connect with students, and not the frustration of their instructional goals, that leads them to feel burned out (Friedman, 2004). Feeling adrift from the ideals that led them to the profession, overburdened teaching machines quit. A depersonalized school climate also negatively impacts students. Upon entry to middle school, many adolescents encounter teachers who tend to view their students more as learners of content and less as individuals, and who use coercive power to establish order (Lewis, 2006). Coupled with the impersonal organizational elements of most secondary schools (e.g., large