Parent Involvement

Cochran, 1

Katie Cochran
Fall 2016
EDPR 7521
Dr. Strohmer
Motivation of Parent Involvement in Secondary-Level Schooling

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In the article, Motivation of Parent Involvement in Secondary-Level Schooling,

Deslandes and Bertrand examine multiple aspects of parental involvement and how parental
involvement influences students in their studies. The central issue focused around how parents
become involved and how their involvement shapes role construction, self-efficacy, perception of
teacher invitations, and perception of adolescent invitations to predict parent involvement at
home and at school in grades 7, 8, and 9? As the article begins, Deslandes and Bertrand
immediately go into discussion of parental involvement and where it stems from and how it
impacts a students relationships with teachers and their involvement in school.
Deslandes and Bertrand relied heavily on past literature not only to pose their research
question, but also to surround their current research. The research has four aspects to it, and the
researchers immediately went into that research for each angle that the research went into. The
researchers relied heavily on past literature, forming a quantitative study. As the research
continued on, Deslandes and Bertrand narrowed down their research question and goals into one
sentence, capitalizing their central issue. The research states, To examine how the four
psychological constructs infl uence parent-involvement decisions across the three secondary
grade levels, we posed the following research question: What are the relative contributions of
parents role construction, self-effi cacy, perceptions of teacher invitations, and perceptions of
adolescent invitations to predict parent involvement at home and at school in grades 7, 8, and
9?.
The results were broken down by grade brackets. The first set of results showed that
parents perceptions of students invitations were the largest contributing factors for parents being
involved in their childs academic lives. Table 3 in the text lays down the Mean and Standard
Deviation from each grade examined. One of the surprising aspects of table three shows that

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parental involvement, though instigated for different reasons, slowly decreases from grade 7 to
grade 8 and then to grade 9. But when examining the different causes for parental involvement
over the three class grades, it is shown that the reasons tend to stay pretty steady. Leaving table
three and reading the results in the researchers words, parents role construction in grade seven
and grade nine were the biggest causes for parental involvement, while in grade eight the largest
contributing factor is parents perceptions of teachers invitations.
The research approach used relied heavily on past research and past studies surrounding
the same topic of parental involvement in their childrens studies across the class grades. I found
this to be a sound piece of research with this approach because (1) it gave validity to the current
research, (2) it laid the groundwork for this article, and (3) it proved that the research was
necessary for the current research, as well as future research. As the world continues to evolve
and as education continues to be altered with public perceptions and realities, this type of
research is imperative to understand the trends of parental involvement and what causes it in
regards to the field of education and how educators can help create it.
The downside to the methods used was (1) it relied so heavily on past research
that I felt a lot of the article was nothing but past research, (2) while the use of past research was
good, it didnt feel original or like new, groundbreaking research, and (3) I felt that on the
demographics portion of the methods section, they threw a curve ball talking about the
different family types, but that wasnt discussed in the results section, making that a moot point.
The practical implications of this study is that educators can look at this research to know
the best way to gauge and pique parent involvement with their students. They can also look at it
and know, depending on the age of the student, how they can properly reach the parents to
involve them in their students lives. In future research, I would like to see the demographics

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portion go futher in the methods and results section. Id like to look at single parents, blended
families, newly married parents or newly divorced parents, grandparents raising their
grandchildren, etc, I would just like to see how the different family types could differ, or may
be the same.