ANN ARBOR—School programs that intervene when parents are uninvolved with their children’s education are proving to be successful, a new study indicates.

University of Michigan researchers found that youths who received school-based intervention became more focused on success as a personally relevant goal and more concerned with avoiding factors that might get them off track, including drugs or pregnancy, said Daphna Oyserman, a professor in the School of Social Work and study’s lead author.

“When parents are involved in school, this communicates to their child that they believe that school success is possible for them, that doing well is congruent with other important social identities, and that difficulties in working toward school goals can be overcome,” Oyserman said. “Interventions that focus children’s attention on school as a path to success and as a way to avoid failures may engage them in ways that are congruent with what may occur when parent school involvement is high.”

Factors analyzed included how much time the students spent doing homework, their grades, whether they had to repeat the eighth grade, school attendance and in-class behavior, including initiative taking and disruptiveness. The intervention significantly improved results on all of these outcomes. In this study, parents were asked about their involvement with their child’s school. The relationship between parent school involvement and student grades and in-class behaviors was compared for control and intervention groups.

The researchers examined a two-year follow-up of 239 eighth graders attending three Detroit middle schools. The students were randomly assigned into two groups. One group received their regular elective course and the other received an 11-session intervention called Adolescent Pathways: School-to-Jobs (STJ). Each STJ session focused on the student’s future. Students imagined their personally relevant future goals or possible selves. Some sessions helped students link their possible selves with important social identities and others focused on helping students cope with difficulty in working on possible selves.

For the control group youth, school involvement by parents had a positive effect on both grade point averages and class behavior, Oyserman said. For the students in intervention, however, low parent school involvement did not influence either grade point average or behavior, indicating that the invention helped youth compensate for low parent school involvement. Overall, the intervention group had significantly better grades and better in-class behavior than the control group.

“Many parents are truly burdened and are unlikely to be able to become highly involved in school even when they value their children’s education,” Oyserman said. “These results suggest that brief, activity-based, in-school intervention like School-to-Jobs can help instill these same perspectives and reduce achievement gaps. Our current goal is to translate this intervention to earlier school years.”

The researchers noted that the study’s limitations, including the parent school involvement data were collected at only one point. In addition, the study doesn’t indicate what support would be needed for parents so that they can have the time and resources to be involved with their children’s school.

Oyserman, whose appointments also include the U-M Institute for Social Research and Department of Psychology, co-authored the paper with doctoral students Daniel Brickman and Marjorie Rhodes. The study was funded by the National Institutes of Health.

The findings appear in the current issue of Family Relations.

Related Links:

• Daphna Oyserman
• Family Relations