Parental involvement in Russian primary schools and its relationships with students' academic results

• In Event: Inequality and attainment in schools

Proposal

Parental involvement is a complex construct which is differently defined in different studies (Jeynes, 2010). However, there is an agreement that two types of parental involvement during school period of student’s academic life are home-based involvement and school-based involvement (Pomerantz et al, 2007). Many studies are dedicated to the question of which type of involvement is more beneficial for students’ progress, because an answer to this question may shape educational policies of schools and provide the direction for ‘parental involvement development’. In the USA this question is well-researched, most studies demonstrated positive relationships of most measures of parental involvement with students’ outcomes (Wilder, 2014). Because parental involvement is culturally-depended construct (Hornby, 2007), it is important to
have empirical results which can support ideas about relationships between parental involvement and students’ outcomes. In Russia, only iPIPS project and, to an extent, international comparative studies like PISA, PIRLS or TIMSS, provide data which include parental involvement questions together with measures of children’s academic outcomes. Despite the lack of information most schools are required to provide activities and design strategies for parental involvement. In the situation of cultural dependency of the construct it is important to have national data rather than rely on international results.

The goal of this study was 1. to develop reliable measures of parental involvement in primary schools; 2. to assess the relationships between parental involvement and academic outcomes of students; and 3. to find what factor help predict parental involvement in the middle of primary school.

Study design:
This is a longitudinal study of Russian primary school children from a regionally representative sample stratified by the type of settlement (rural vs urban) and type of school (regular secondary schools vs schools of higher status). The region Tatarstan is a typical (according to economic and population characteristics) Russian region, which is specific only in the way that it has a large proportion of non-Russian speakers because Tatar language is also an official language of the region. The study included 1940 primary school children whose cognitive skills (mathematics, reading, phonology and vocabulary) and non-cognitive skills (social and emotional skills) were assessed three times. 1. In the fall of 2015 when children started their 1st grade of primary school; 2. In the spring of 2016 when they finished their first grade of primary school; 3. In the fall of 2017, when they started their 3d grade. Their parents also filled in questionnaires for parents twice, in the 1st and 3d grades, answering context questions about students’ development in their families. Teachers also filled in questionnaires for teachers to provide the information about school contexts of children development.

Assessment tools:
Children’s characteristics. All cognitive and non-cognitive measures of children were obtained via Russian versions of iPIPS (international Performance Indicators in Primary Schools) project. These tools are standardized instruments of assessment with proven psychometric characteristics (Kardanova et al, 2018).
Parental characteristics. The focus of this study is on the parental involvement which was assessed using two scales. The scale of pre-school parental involvement was distributed among parents of children when children started schools and was based on the scale of parental pre-school activities from PIRLS-TIMSS 2011. However, this scale was modified to better reflect Russian cultural specific. The scale was analyzed under Rasch Rating Scale Model and demonstrated good psychometric characteristics and model fit. Because parental involvement in primary school is more complex than the pre-school involvement, as the construct receives a new dimension, namely, school-based involvement, for the parents of third-graders we developed a parental questionnaire using scenario scale approach based on Guttman facet theory and Rasch measurement principles (more on scenario scales: Ludlow et al, 2014). The nine scenario items described nine parents from very academically involved to academically uninvolved. Each scenario consisted of four sentences describing four facets of parental involvement: a). home-based academically-oriented parental involvement, b). family cultural and educational outings, c). school-based parental involvement, and d). focus of child’s well-being. Parents were asked to assess their involvement into child’s academic life relative to each scenario (much higher, higher, equal, lower, and much lower). The analysis of the scale under Rasch Rating Scale model demonstrated excellent psychometric characteristics. This supports a theoretical idea that parental involvement is a holistic construct.
Apart from parental involvement scales, parents were asked about their education level, financial situation, number of books at home and other typical SES variable.
Teachers questionnaires. Teachers answered questions about school resources, their own work experience, learning materials used at lessons.

Method of analysis:
The data were analyzed in R software using multilevel regressions with students on the first levels and classes on the second levels.

Results:
The results showed that in the first year of school, pre-school parental involvement is a significant and important predictor of student’s results in the beginning and in the end of the first grade, even taking into account teachers’ experience, parents’ education, family financial situation and cultural capital. However, in the third grade, parental involvement both pre-school and ‘concurrent’ (measured at the same time) do not explain variation of children’s results, taking into account other family and school characteristics. Also at this time, the type of school (higher status or regular secondary school) becomes a significant predictor of children’s results in reading and math. We suppose that in such a ‘school-centered’ country as Russia, the real impact of parental involvement is less during school years than it is considered by policy makers.

Limitations:
Parental involvement questions are prone to social desirability. We did not take into account whether some students had special needs or disabilities. We assessed only parental involvement, while in Russia many families are three-generation, and grand-parents are often involved into children’s education.

Author

• Inna Antipkina, National Research University Higher School of Economics