The role of parental perceptions and parental involvement in children’s learning

• In Event: Understanding Social Responsibility towards Teaching and Learning, Part 1: The role of Community Actors.

Proposal

Decades of research highlight the potential influence of parents’ educational involvement on children’s learning outcomes. These researchers contend that by examining the potential motivators of involvement, we can understand which parents become involved in their children’s educational journey and why. Research in recent years finds that several different parent-, teacher-, school- and child-level characteristics influence parental involvement. These include parental perceptions of their children’s learning or, in other words, their estimates of their child’s current learning attainment.
However, research on the mediating effect of perceptions on involvement levels is primarily situated in the Global North and evidence from low- and middle-income countries, particularly rural contexts, is limited. If involvement levels are indeed mediated by perceptions in these contexts, this needs to be highlighted to allow policy-makers and practitioners to make appropriate adaptations when working with communities.
This paper uses data from over 20,000 households surveyed at baseline and midline as part of an ongoing evaluation of a program in rural Uttar Pradesh. The intervention aims to improve school and community actors’ perceptions of and engagement towards children’s learning. The first part of the paper will discuss results from an OLS regression and interaction analysis using baseline data to explore parental involvement in education in rural Sitapur, particularly the mediating effect that parental perceptions of children’s learning have on involvement. We will then present the results of a fixed effects analysis that considers changes in parental involvement over the course of the intervention, controlling for several other characteristics including parental perceptions of children’s learning, gender and affluence.
Preliminary analyses demonstrate important ways in which parental involvement influences children’s learning outcomes in reading and maths. When considering the interaction between this association and parental perceptions of children’s learning, we find that children with parents who hold a low or uncertain perception of their learning have similar learning outcomes to each other, irrespective of the parent’s involvement levels. However, among children whose parents who hold a high perception of their learning, higher parental involvement levels is linked to higher learning outcomes. In addition, our analyses demonstrate that overall parental involvement levels significantly increased from baseline to midline. Yet, when we account for parental perceptions, the positive change in parental involvement becomes no longer statistically significant, indicating that parental perceptions could be a key driver of involvement.
These preliminary findings also suggest that programmes and policies need to account for the differing and interacting influence of parental perceptions and involvement on children’s learning. Interventions in rural India should not only focus on making parents more aware of their children’s learning, but also stress that all children can learn, in order to create a conducive environment for learning and thriving in families and communities.

Authors

• Preeti Manchanda, ASER Centre, Pratham Education Foundation

• Laura Cashman, University of Cambridge

• Purnima Ramanujan, ASER Centre