Parental Involvement in Children’s School Work at Home: A Quasi-Experimental Study Reviewing Parents’ Involvement through an Online Science Resource

The importance of parental involvement in their children’s learning are highlighted by many studies in the literature and this study attempted to increase parental involvement in their child’s science and general learning. This study includes several aims that were investigated in two stages. The first aim of this study, which investigated in Stage One was to identify the extent of parental involvement in their child’s general and science learning, and the relationships between level of involvement and parents’ backgrounds (parents, gender, child’s gender, school group, science based career, family education). The second stage included the main purpose of this study. This purpose was to investigate the effects of parents’ practising online science activities with their child intervention on parental involvement and parents’ attitudes towards science as well as children’s attitudes towards science. Parents of either public and private schools’ children from two different cities (Hatay and Gaziantep) of Southern Turkey participated in this study. Different groups of parents and their children took part in the two stages of this study. For Stage One, 202 parents participated in the parental involvement questionnaire from both private and public schools located in these two cities. 36 (18 parents for each experimental and control group) private school parents and their children participated in the Stage Two of this study. One private school from each city was selected to be the experimental and the control group. A quasi-experimental research design with experimental and control groups was used. Experimental and control groups were formed according to a matching technique which involve matching parents to the groups according to their involvement level, gender and education level. Parental involvement questionnaire, parents’ and children’s attitudes towards science questionnaire, weekly feedback forms, parents’ interviews were the main data collection tools for this study and these were used as pre and post-interventions. The intervention implemented with experimental group’s parents and their children for five weeks. Parents were provided with science activities of an online website and instructions through email and handout by the science teacher. They expected to practise these activities weekly with their child at home. The results from Stage One showed that parents’ level of involvement, role construction beliefs, self-efficacy beliefs and attitudes towards science were positive, but their perceptions of invitation from teachers and their child were low. The results from Stage Two demonstrated that the intervention positively increased parental involvement in their child’s general and science learning and the invitations from teachers and their child. A positively small difference for parents’ self-efficacy beliefs was also found. However, parents’ and children’s attitudes towards science and parents’ communication with teacher did not change after the intervention. In addition, a small decrease was found regarding parents’ role construction beliefs.