Effects of parental involvement programs on young children’s academic and social-emotional outcomes: A meta-analysis

• In Event: Families and contexts that shape developmental trajectories

Abstract

Introduction: For the past two decades, the positive influence of parental involvement on elementary, middle, and secondary school children’s academic performance, learning motivation, attention and task persistence, and their wellbeing at school has documented in several meta-analyses and meta-syntheses (e.g., Barger, Kim, Kuncel, & Pomerantz, 2019; Fan & Chen, 2001; Hill & Tyson, 2009; Jeynes, 2007). Consequently, promoting parental involvement has become a key ingredient of school policy and various parental involvement programs aimed at raising children’s school success by increasing parents’ participation in their children’s education have been developed.
Expanding on the approach of Barger et al. (2019) meta-analysis, which is the most recent meta-analysis published on parents’ involvement with a correlational approach, we included different dimensions of parental involvement but focused on intervention studies. We investigated the effect of parental involvement interventions on children’s academic and social-emotional outcomes from preschool to 3rd grade. For this synthesis, we aim to address the following questions:
1. To what extent do interventions aimed at improving parental involvement have an effect on children’s performance?
2. What characteristics of the intervention can explain variation in the effect of the intervention on children’s outcomes?
3. Do the effects of the intervention on child outcomes differ depending on the effect of the intervention on parental involvement itself?
Method: To identify relevant published and unpublished research on parental involvement interventions two approaches were used. First, multiple reference databases were searched: Education Resources Information Center (ERIC), PsyInfo, Child Development & Adolescent Studies, Sociological Abstracts, and Dissertation Abstracts International. Second, the snowballing approach was used to identify additional studies from reference section of previous meta-analyses on parental involvement. Four criteria were used to decide whether the studies would be included in the analysis. First, report an intervention on parental involvement. Second, parental practices focused on the schooling contexts. Third, children aged between 2 and 8. Fourth, effect size of the intervention on at least one aspect of children’s outcomes was reported, or enough data was provided to calculate the effect size. The flowchart of included and excluded studies is present in Figure 1. Effect size Hedges’g was extracted or calculated to analyze the impact of the intervention on child outcomes. All analyses were conducted in R (R Core Team, 2013) using the metafor package (Viechtbauer, 2014).
Results: The 39 studies included in the meta-analysis, had a total of 12.653 children, and 307 effect sizes were obtained. Results of the overall effect size (g = 0.35, CI: 0.27, 0.44, p < .001) are presented in the forest plot in Figure 2. The Q test also indicated statistically significant between-studies variance (Q (38) = 91.91, p < .001). The Meta-regression analysis shown that no particular characteristics of the intervention explain variation in the effect of the intervention on children’s outcomes. Additionally, we found that for one SD increase in the effect on parental involvement children performance increase 0.36 SD (p = .022; 95% CI: 0.05, 0.66; SE: 0.14).

Authors

• Jimena Cosso, Pennsylvania State University, University Park
  Presenting Author

• Antje von Suchodoletz, New York University Abu Dhabi
  Non-Presenting Author

• Hirokazu Yoshikawa, New York University
  Non-Presenting Author