Gain or Vain: The Heterogenous Relationship between Parent-Teacher Contact and Student Academic Performance

• In Event: 21020 - Section on Sociology of Education Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 22: The Role of Family, Health, and Parental Engagement in Education and Well-Being

Abstract

Research on parent-teacher contact often takes it as either social/cultural capital or parental involvement shaping student academic performance but neglects the agency of students and the equalizing effects of schools. To address these limitations, I propose a novel, two-dimensional framework, which contains an objective dimension – students’ existing academic performance – and a subjective dimension – students’ sense of belonging to school.

The analysis of two waves of data from the China Education Panel Survey (CEPS), based on school fixed-effects models, supports this framework. First, parent-teacher contact is irrespective of students’ past academic achievement, which refutes the reactive involvement hypothesis and supports the proactive involvement hypothesis. Second, in general, parent-teacher contact has a positive relationship with students’ subsequent educational achievement. Third, however, this positive general relationship has certain heterogeneities. It is statistically significant only among low-achieving students and students with a high sense of belonging to school, supporting the “gain” hypothesis, but not significant among high-achieving students and students with a low sense of belonging to school, supporting the “vain” hypothesis.

This framework provides theory-informed and practically applicable guidelines to better understand the educational implications of parent-teacher contact.

Author

• Wensong Shen, The Chinese University of Hong Kong