Abstract

Prior research on the relationship between parental involvement in schools and children's academic achievement has been inconclusive, finding some positive effects and some negative effects of parent involvement. This study investigated the effects of parental involvement on kindergarten children's reading achievement. Working from a conceptual basis in Bronfenbrenner's Ecological System Theory (1998), the present study distinguished between the effects of an individual child's parental involvement at home and at school and the collective effect of a school atmosphere in which parents are actively involved on kindergarten students and their parents. The study data (N=3,142) were drawn from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study's Kindergarten Class-Kindergarten version. A Hierarchical Linear Modeling (HLM) technique was used to uncover both the effects of individual parent activities and collective parent activities. The major finding resulting from the HLM analyses was that while there is no significant effect of an individual child's parental involvement at school, a school atmosphere in which parents are actively and collectively involved mitigates the effect of children's prior achievement on their reading achievement at the end of the kindergarten year. That is, in educational environments characterized by high collective parent involvement, kindergarten children are more likely to end their school year with higher reading achievement compared to the start of the year.