Early Childhood Parental Engagement and Educational Quality Expectations in Ghana

• In Event: Parent engagement and perceptions in early childhood care and education

Proposal

The role of early childhood education (ECE) in promoting school readiness and supporting academic achievement is gaining interest around the world. In this paper, we address parents’ perspectives of their role in their child’s early education in Ghana, where policies have been adopted to increase access and quality of pre-primary education in the past decade. As best practices in ECE are debated around the world, the role of parents is increasingly being recognized as important for educational change (Black et al., 2017; Glewwe, 2013), making their perspectives an important facet of educational policymaking.

Few studies have examined parents’ preferences for involvement in and quality of ECE in low- and middle-income countries. Research on Ghanaians’ parental engagement has mainly focused on children older than 10 years (Chowa et al., 2012; Ghanney, 2017; Nyarko, 2011), with more recent findings indicating low ECE engagement (Amadu et al., 2018). Recent studies on parental quality perceptions of ECE have pointed to a mismatch between parents’ preferences and the Ghanaian pre-primary curriculum (Kabay et al., 2017; Wolf, 2020). Understanding parents’ perception about quality ECE and their role in their child’s learning may shed light on some of these mismatches.

By employing quantitative and qualitative metrics, this study aims to investigate (i) parental involvement in children’s early education, and (ii) parental perceptions of early childhood educational quality in Ghana. Using survey data from 2220 caregivers and semi-structured interviews with a subset of 25, we investigate parental engagement in the home and in school, as well as the nature and predictors of school choice. For quantitative analysis, we use OLS regression models with Huber-White corrected standard errors to adjust for clustering in schools. For qualitative analysis, we use grounded theory methodology (Corbin & Strauss, 2008). Interviews were coded based on a scheme accounting for emerging themes and existing ECE literature. Sub-codes were also developed based on each code and its emerging theme.

1.- Parental Engagement

Parental engagement was analysed using Fantuzzo et al.’s framework (2000), which categorizes involvement into three areas: home-based involvement, school-based involvement, and home-school conferencing. Our preliminary quantitative analyses suggest that key predictors of home-based involvement are caregivers’ education level and marital status, and whether English and Twi / Fanti (the dominant language of the region) were spoken at home. School-based involvement was associated with caregivers’ biological relationship with their wards and their level of education, the number of books in the household, and private school attendance. Reported importance of home-school communication was negatively associated with having a female child and caregiver level of education, while positively associated with having no male head in the household and with private school attendance.

In the qualitative analysis, we found that home-based involvement mostly entailed providing educational materials and homework support to children. When parents had low levels of education, they reported finding tutors or more educated family members to provide homework support, but not to provide cognitive or socio-emotional stimulation. We found that attending PTA meetings was the most common form of parental school-based involvement, though these events typically centered around institutional needs. Finally, parent-teacher communication was the most prominent form of home-school conferencing. We found that parents used various modes to communicate with teachers, meeting them or communicating by phone or text, depending on their preferences and circumstances, combining them in ways that suited their daily schedules. Parent-teacher communication, however, was viewed as necessary when children’s academic performance was poor, with most parents reporting positive changes after receiving teacher feedback.

2.- Parents’ Quality Definitions

When assessing quality definitions, we categorized features into structural, process, convenience, health and safety, costs and payments, academics, parent-teacher communication, school-specific and other. Descriptive analyses of the quantitative data showed large differences between parents’ hypothetical definition of school quality and the qualities they considered when choosing a school for their child. Most important to parents when choosing preschools were features of convenience, followed by process quality, and academics, while process and structural quality were most important for the hypothetical scenario.

The qualitative data revealed multi-tiered perceptions of educational quality, which we grouped into teacher-level, classroom-level, and school-level. We found that parents perceived the principal characteristic of a good teacher to be patience, followed by teacher training or educational qualifications. However, when speaking about their experiences with teachers, most parents valued teachers’ likelihood to communicate with them more than these characteristics. We hypothesize that parents feel unqualified to provide educational training or believe that as parents their duties should be restricted to caregiving and passively supporting their child’s education.

At the classroom-level, most shared likes and dislikes regarding the existence or quality of resources, the ambiance of the classrooms, class sizes, and cleanliness. Parents’ preschool quality definitions were found to focus on specific structural and process features, and the availability of academic resources. However, complaints about increases in costs and payments to schools and the need for increased parent-teacher communication were typical, though parents did not associate these features with quality education.

Discussion

Parent outreach to improve involvement at schools may benefit from targeting families where the primary caregiver is not the parent, especially in public institutions. Improving the perceived importance of parent-teacher communication may require reframing its benefits, as parents with higher education levels are more likely to link increased communication to poor performance. Harnessing the viability of text-message communication, especially as a way for teachers to reach out to parents to discuss the child’s progress, regardless of their performance, could lead to more favorable perceptions of parent-teacher communication.

The perspectives of all stakeholders are critical to ensure successful execution of educational policies. Within the Ghanaian changing context, this means considering parents’ definitions of quality and their roles in their children’s education. For instance, the finding that parents’ engagement with teachers or at schools typically stem from situations that cause parents stress or embarrassment can be applied at the policy- and school-level to improve involvement practices. Such a holistic approach to ECE policy is paramount in providing a support system for young children to develop properly, both at school and at home.

Authors

• Berta Bartoli, University of Pennsylvania

• Crishnaa Joshi, University of Pennsylvania

• Sharon Wolf, University of Pennsylvania