Changes in the Effect of Parent-Child Communication on Children's Academic Achievement in South Korea: 2000-2018

• In Event: Redefining Korean Families and Their Roles in Children’s Academic Success in South Korea

Proposal

Objectives. Parental involvement in education—referring to a wide range of activities, including but not limited to discussing school-related issues, assisting with homework, and attending parent-teacher meetings—is important to predict children’s academic success. Literature, however, suggests that parental involvement and its relationship with children’s academic achievement differ not only by family socioeconomic status (SES), but also by broader societal contexts. For example, Park (2008) found that while parent-child communication has a positive impact on children’s academic achievement, its positive effect was more pronounced for children from low-SES families in standardized education systems than their counterparts with similar socioeconomic backgrounds in less standardized educational systems. Park’s (2008) findings offer important insights into the role of the institutional features of education in shaping the dynamics among family SES, parent-child communication, and children’s academic achievement. At the same time, his findings suggest that the relationships among family SES, parent-child communication, and children’s academic achievement may change within a country if there were changes in a country’s educational system. Yet, little research has examined how the differing relationship between parent-child communication and children’s academic achievement by family SES has changed in response to changes in a country’s educational system. Accordingly, the purpose of this study is to examine how the relationships among family SES, parent-child communication, and children’s academic achievement changed over time through a study of Korea. Korea is an appealing case for this topic because it once adopted a highly standardized education system with national standards and curricula. However, since the 2000s, educational policies in Korea have been geared toward decentralization and relaxing standardizations.
Methods. This study drew on data from PISA 2000 and 2018 and estimated OLS regression models to examine how the relationships among family SES, parent-child communication, and children’s academic achievement changed between 2000 and 2018.
Results. Preliminary results showed that parent-child communication had a positive effect on children’s academic achievement in both 2000 and 2018. In addition, students from low-SES families tended to benefit more from parent-children communication in both 2000 and 2018. However, the degree to which children from low-SES families tended to benefit more from parent-children communication was smaller in 2018 than in 2000. These results indicated that recent policy changes geared toward decentralization and relaxing standardizations might have reduced the beneficial effect of parent-children communication for children from low-SES families. In other words, as Korea’s educational system became less standardized, children from low-SES families seem to have less benefitted from their interaction with their parents. As such, our study offers important insights into the role of educational policy changes in shaping the relationships among family SES, parent-child communication, and children’s academic achievement within a country.

Authors

• Suyoung Park, Pennsylvania State University

• Jilli Jung, Pennsylvania State University

• Soo-yong Byun, Penn State University