School education constitutes an important milestone in the life of an individual. This stage commences at a tender age of five or six and continues till fifteen or seventeen.Eduactional outcome is a deciding factor of a student’s career. A success may boost confidence or a failure may retard the motivation. In order to achieve a good academic position there is a need of some interference or involvement by parents. Previously, it was indicated that the parental involvement is associated with student achievements (Jeynes, 2005). This became evident when the achievement scores or grades of children in schools with highly involved parents was found higher compared to children with less involved parents.
It was found that the student achievements were determined by the parental involvements through the large amount of time that was spent on reading and conversing with one’s child, and the style and anticipations. These aspects of parental involvement have shown more impact on educational outcome compared to other aspects like household rules, parent attendance and their involvement in school functions (Jeynes, 2005).
Further the impact of parental involvement may vary depending on the ethnicity. It was found that parental involvement was larger for African American compared to Asian American children. These results have indicated that there is a consistency of parental involvement across races and ethnic groups (Jeynes, 2005). Here, it can be inferred that students of African American origin may achieve a good educational outcome compared to their counterparts, Asian Americans if this trend of parental involvement continues.
These aspects may better strengthen the fact that parental involvement serves as a valuable tool for educational achievements for school going children in urban areas.
Further, from the other meta- analysis descriptions it was found that the behavior of parents might also show a great impact on student’s mental attitude. This may be because a school student is more prone to digress from his normal schedule, like smoking, alcohol consumption or violent offending. This might badly influence his educational outcome.
It is this stage a parent should monitor and provide a suitable guidance through his or her behavior. In other words, the parent should volunteer his child’s day to day activities that might interfere with the education (Huang, Grace Hui-Chen Mason, & Kimberly, 2008).
Next, frame work for an effective parental involvement would be decision making. (Huang, Grace Hui-Chen Mason,& Kimberly,2008).A student career may be largely influenced by ups and downs and a successful career might need a good consistency. Hence, a key decision like changing the learning practices, atmosphere or diet might induce a parallel change leading to a good academic achievement.
Finally, parent involvement would better influence the student’s achievement when they effectively collaborate with the community. (Huang, Grace Hui-Chen Mason,& Kimberly, 2008).
This might enable them to acquire and develop the skills in handling the children at home and in imparting best training. There is a scope for adopting new methodologies and refining the existing ones through this approach. For this purpose, weekly meetings for parents need to be conducted at schools with the objective of providing a feed back about their children’s learning capabilities.Here, another fact is that through this approach it would be easier to learn and understand from the experiences of other parent members by an exchange of valuable suggestions. Therefore, parental involvement seems to be vital in deciding the educational achievement of students in urban schools. The key aspects of parental involvement may be parenting, communicating, volunteering at home, decision-making, and collaborating with community (Huang, Grace Hui-Chen Mason,& Kimberly, 2008).
References
William H. Jeynes (2005). Parental Involvement and Student Achievement: A Meta-Analysis. Family involvement research digests. Web.
Huang, Grace Hui-Chen Mason, Kimberly, L. Motivations of Parental Involvement in Children’s Learning. 2008. Web.