| Brenda Arellano
University of California, Santa Barbara
The impact of parental involvement in the achievement of language minority Latino students in early elementary school
FINAL REPORT:
This research is an empirical study of parent involvement of language minority parents and its relationship to academic achievement in third grade. The purpose of this study was two-fold. This first part was dedicated to understanding how language-minority parents are involved in the early elementary education of their children. The second part of this paper was to understand parent involvement as a multi-dimensional concept and to identify those aspects that contributed to third grade achievement across four different language groups. This study was based on secondary analysis of data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study (ECLS-K), kindergarten class of 1998 and used longitudinal data from kindergarten and third grade. Various forms of parent involvement in elementary school were tested for direct or indirect impacts on the academic achievement of three subgroups of language minority families called English Primary, Spanish Primary and Other Primary compared to non-language families to understand whether differences in parent involvement frequencies and impacts existed among groups. This study tested whether the concept of parental involvement was multi-dimensional and whether certain aspects are more effective in improving achievement outcomes.
The two most important dimensions of parent involvement were home learning activities and school involvement. School involvement had small to medium positive impacts directly and indirectly across all language groups while home involvement had small positive impacts indirect effects across all language groups as well that were mediated through kindergarten literacy on third grade achievement. Findings suggest that that not all forms of parent involvement impact academic achievement equally and that the impacts vary across language groups.
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