Greater parental involvement in school (serving on committees, checking the kids’ homework) does not correlate with greater academic achievement. I wonder how these findings would relate to homeschooling.
The theory was that more active and invested mothers and fathers could help close the test-score gap between middle-class and poor students. Yet until the new study, nobody had used the available data to test the assumption that close relationships between parents and schools improve student achievement. | While Robinson and Harris largely disproved that assumption, they did find a handful of habits that make a difference, such as reading aloud to young kids (fewer than half of whom are read to daily) and talking with teenagers about college plans. But these interventions don’t take place at school or in the presence of teachers, where policy makers exert the most influence—they take place at home. —Don’t Help Your Kids With Their Homework – Atlantic Mobile.
i know, i get it. and i agree :) just didn’t get that from the article is all. they need to stop spending time doing “research” to prove rightness or wrongness and use that time to go help these teachers !! and yes, it was a stupid title LOL!
One way to show your kids you value their education (and their security!) is to volunteer at their school, but the study showed that even parents who didn’t volunteer at the school, but who otherwise exposed kids to an environment in which education was valued also provided whatever secret ingredient that led to success.
The headline “Don’t help your kids” is a silly exaggerated claim that a journalist wrote in order to get people interested in (and perhaps upset about) the subject. The scholars who did the study didn’t offer that kind of exaggerated conclusion. The point of *their* study was that so far, even the people who say parental involvement leads to academic success haven’t been able to prove it. What looked like a correlation between parental involvement and student success is actually a correlation between between high achievement and kids who were read to a lot and also between high achievement and kids with parents who provided an environment that showed the kids the value of an education.
i know my kids are more secure knowing that i am there a lot and that does help them! And me being there helps the other kids too. They all benefit from having someone extra there to help. reduces stress in teachers and makes an adult more accessible. Benefits all around.
besides, they didn’t test the kids who’s parents ARE involved before the parents became involved. know what i mean? they have nothing to compare too. Each child’s achievement is individual. There are lots of great students who’ls parents aren’t involved at all and when compared to a child that has a learning disability or maybe is just average( but the parents’ ARE involved), they will always score lower than a gifted child. But that doesn’t mean that their test scores would be the same if their parent didn’t help them. maybe their score IS elevated for THEM. Understand what i am saying? not that i think just going in to the classroom to make copies for an hour each week is going to make your kid a genius or anything LOL!
i don’t think most of those things can be measured very accurately.
When kids were grouped according to those whose parents were very involved and those whose parents weren’t so involved, there was not the kind of difference we would expect from something that everyone assumes to be true. Chances are the parents who are active in school also read to their kids at home, or are well-educated themselves, or know a lot of people who work in jobs where education was important, and it was those factors — reading to kids and raising kids in an environment where kids could see for themselves the value of education — that mattered more, over the course of decades, than whether parents volunteered in school or checked homework.
wow, that is quite broad….. and i don’t agree with most of it.
Don’t Help Your Kids With Their Homework http://t.co/o0XWy0IpiI