Kathleen V. Hoover-Dempsey

Why Do Parents Become Involved in Their Children’s Education?

This article reviews psychological theory and research critical to understanding why parents become involved in their children’s elementary and secondary education. Three major constructs are believed to be central to parents’ basic involvement decisions. First, parents’ role construction defines parents’ beliefs about what they are supposed to do in their children’s education and appears to establish the basic range of activities that parents construe as important, necessary, and permissible for their own actions with and on behalf of children. Second, parents’ sense of efficacy for helping their children succeed in school focuses on the extent to which parents believe that through their involvement they can exert positive influence on their children’s educational outcomes. Third, general invitations, demands, and opportunities for involvement refer to parents’ perceptions that the child and school want them to be involved. Hypotheses concerning the functioning of the three constructs in an additive model are suggested, as are implications for research and practice. Overall, the review suggests that even well-designed school programs inviting involvement will meet with only limited success if they do not address issues of parental role construction and parental sense of efficacy for helping children succeed in school.

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.

Parent Involvement: Contributions of Teacher Efficacy, School Socioeconomic Status, and Other School Characteristics

The study tested the hypothesis that varying levels of parent involvement would be related to variations in qualities of school settings, specifically school socioeconomic status, teacher degree level, grade level, class size, teachers’ sense of efficacy, principal perceptions of teacher efficacy, organizational rigidity, and instructional coordination. Teacher (n = 1,003) and principal (n = 66) reports and perceptions of the variables of interest were assessed in a sample of 66 elementary schools distributed across a large mid-Southern state. Stepwise multiple regression analyses revealed that various combinations of the predictors accounted for significant portions of the variance in all parent involvement outcomes: parent conferences (52%), parent volunteers (27%), parent home tutoring (24%), parent involvement in home instruction programs (22%), and teacher perception of parent support (41%). Variables most consistently involved in outcomes were teacher efficacy and school socioeconomic status. Results are discussed with reference to parent-teacher role complementarity and implications for increasing productive interconnections between parents and schools.

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.

Individual Situational Contributors to Teacher Burnout.

Building on previous work in education and the social sciences, we formulated a model for studying teacher burnout that focused on both individual and environmental factors believed to be implicate...

Why Do Parents Homeschool? A Systematic Examination of Parental Involvement:

Although homeschooling is growing in popularity in the United States, little systematic research has focused on this population. Grounded in the parental involvement literature, this study examines why parents decide to home-school. Parents of 136 homeschooled elementary children completed questionnaires assessing constructs derived from the parental involvement literature and personal beliefs identified in the homeschooling literature as important to parents’ decisions to homeschool. Results suggest that home-schooling parents appear to be motivated by an active role construction, strong sense of efficacy for helping the child learn, and positive perceptions of life context. Homeschool parents’ beliefs about the values, content, adequacy, and methods of public school education appear to be implicated less strongly in their decisions. Findings are discussed with reference to the development of a systematic and theoretically grounded knowledge base on parents’ motivations for involvement in their children’s education.

Linking Parental Motivations for Involvement and Student Proximal Achievement Outcomes in Homeschooling and Public Schooling Settings

A notable increase in the number of U.S. families choosing to homeschool their children in recent years has underscored the need to develop more systematic knowledge about this approach to education. Drawing on a theoretical model of parental involvement as well as research on families’ social networks, this study longitudinally examines home- and public-school parents’ motivations for home-based involvement in their fourth through eighth grade children’s education at two time points. The study also examines whether involvement activities predicted student proximal achievement outcomes (academic self-efficacy, intrinsic motivation for learning, and self-regulatory strategy use) across the two groups. Results suggest that parental self-efficacy for involvement, specific invitations from the child, and parent social networks are positively related to home-based parental involvement across the groups, although home- and public-school parents recorded significantly different perceptions of personal self-efficacy, role activity beliefs, social networks, and child proximal achievement outcomes. Findings are discussed with reference to implications for future research and practice.

Gatekeeping Transactions: Women's Resource Acquisition and Mental Health in the Workplace

This research explored gatekeeping transactions of professional women in selected occupational fields. Subjects were asked to keep daily records on strategies they used to gain needed resources from other people in their workplace. Characteristics of gatekeeping transactions were studied as potential stressors that might affect specific indicators of mental health. Results suggest that differences in levels of job satisfaction and substance use can be predicted by specific characteristics of gatekeeping transactions, such as total number of transactions, number of strategies used per transaction, negativity of transactions, and gender and role status of gatekeeper. Patterns of influence strategies used by the subjects are discussed, as are implications for future research on gatekeeping transactions in relation to professional womens mental health and job satisfaction.