Overview
- Domain specific perspective in understanding how parenting affect children’s learning
- literacy
- math
- Adopt motivational (vs. cognitive) theories and reserach in understanding domain-specific associations
- focus on children’s motivation rather than children’s skills
Overaching Goal
Bring the two often separate bodies of work - the general perspective with a focus on motivational and the domain-specific perspective with an emphasis on cognitive counterparts - together to reflect on how they may inform one another.
Things to go through in this review paper
- A brief overview of the key broad principles that have emerged from theory and research taking a general perspective to parents involvement in their children’s learning.
- A review of research on parenting practices that appear to be important in fostering skills in the literacy and math domains.
- Guided by the broad principles yielded by the general perspective, we highlight important directions for future research with an emphasis on issues relevant to motivation in the domain specific perspective.
- We also highlight how the knowledge yielded by the domain-specific perspective may contribute to briad principles as to how parents can optimize their children’s learning in general.
Established findings
- From the general perspective
- Across the phases of development through K-12, parents’ involvement(measured as quantity of engagement in academic-related contents) is generally positively associated with children’s achievement, with meta-analyses indicating that the effect sizes fall in the small to moderate range(e.g, Fan &Chen, 2001; Hill & Taylor, 2004; Jeynes,2005).
- The link between parents’ involvement and children’s achievement is evident over time adjusting for childrens earlier achievement (e. g, Cheung Pomerantz, 2011 It holds as well when potential confounds such as parents’socioeconomic status(SES) are taken into account(e. g, Dearing, Krieder, Simpkins, Weiss, 2006)
- parents involvement in children’s learning provides children with key motivational assets (e.g., value of school, sense of control, confidence) that enhance their achievement by facilitating their engagement in school (e. g, Grolnick& Slowiaczek 1994; Pomerantz, Kim, Cheung, 2012).
- Optimal involvement from Self-Determination Theory - general perspective
- Autonomy support vs. controlling
- Structured vs. chaotic
- Mutual positive affect vs. negative affect
- Process vs. person focused
- From the domain-specific perspective
- Literacy
- Both quantity and quality (complexity) of parental talk matters
- Both informal and formal instruction are beneficial
- The quality, or extent to which parents scaffold or tailor their book reading interactions to the level of their children, is important as well(Snow, 1994) - scaffolding - Math
- Number talk -> cardinality ability (Gunderson & Levine, 2011)
Mixed findings
The benefits of formal vs. informal activities has been somewhat mixed.
- Measurement issues
- Little is known about the role of children’s motivation in this skill-development process.
Integrating the general and domain-specific perspectives
- Looking at children’s motivational adjustment through a domain-specific perspective
- Less is know about the effectiveness of scaffolding/practices from cognitive line can be facilitated via the style through which parents implement them.
- Affect (Else-Quest,Hyde, & Hejmadi, 2008)
- Process (vs. person) focus
- parents’ beliefs
Conclusions
Theory and research on parents’ involvement in children’s learning in general, and that on parenting involvement in the literacy and math domains specifically, indicate that parents play an important role in children’s motivation and achievement. Unfortunately, these two bodies of work have been relatively separate, with that of the general perspective focusing on children’s motivation as the key mechanism by which parents contribute to children’s achievement and that of the domain-specific perspective focusing on children’s skills as the key mechanism. There has been little cross-pollination between the two areas, yet we argue that through integrating these perspectives, we will achieve a greater understanding of the mechanisms underlying relations between parental involvement and children’s motivation and academic achievement. One way in which this might take place is if more studies in the domain-specific realm examine motivational factors as potential mediators of specific types of parental practices and children’s skill development. On the other hand, studies originating from a general perspective could integrate more specific measures of parenting practices to try and tease apart the effects of general style and skills-based support on children’s motivation, competence, and achievement. A fruitful way to accomplish this work going forward would be through collaborations by experts in both areas.
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