| Citation: | Redding, S., Langdon, J., Meyer, J., Sheley, P. (2004). The effects of comprehensive parent engagement on student learning outcomes. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, San Diego, CA. |
Annotation:
This quasi-experimental study directly measured the impact of school-wide parent engagement activities on student achievement scores in elementary schools. Researchers presented an evaluation of the effects of a set of comprehensive parent engagement strategies-called the Solid Foundation model-on standardized test scores. These engagement strategies included parent participation in decision making; alignment of the school's policies and procedures regarding homework and parent-teacher conferences; explicit discussion of the roles of parents, teachers, and students in regard to compacts, learning standards, and homework policies; reading school-home links aligned with state standards and in-class instruction; parent education focused on home reading and study habits; and outreach through home visits, family nights, and a family resource library. Results indicated that the standardized test scores for schools showed significant gains following the implementation of the Solid Foundations model. In addition, the test scores of these schools demonstrated significantly greater improvement than all the elementary schools in the state combined. When Solid Foundation schools' test scores were compared to control schools that had been statistically matched on prior test scores, the experimental schools showed significantly greater gains over controls-although both groups made gains. All schools implementing the 12 components of the model were studied as group; each school had met a threshold of successful program implementation. A control group of non-implementing schools was selected by conducting a database search of all schools in the state and matching each project school with a school having an identical base-year composite assessment score. This random match was conducted 1,000 times and the group mean of the 2-year gain on the Illinois standardized test was compared to that of the mean for the project schools. The data were collected on 129 Illinois schools which had low assessment scores in reading. The schools were from various parts of the state and were typically in urban or rural areas. The majority of the students were poor and were members of ethnic minorities. This study suggests that parental involvement in elementary schools may have a positive impact on standardized test scores. One limitation of this study is that increasing parental involvement may affect test scores only in schools that are most in need of such an intervention. In addition, all 12 strategies for parental engagement were implemented at each school, so further research should be conducted to assess whether some strategies are more beneficial than others in increasing standardized test scores.
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