Why Do Parents Become Involved? Research Findings and Implications

Abstract

A decade ago, Hoover-Dempsey and Sandler of-fered a model of the parental involvement pro-cess that focused on understanding why parents become involved in their children’s education and how their involvement influences student outcomes. Since then, we and others have con-ducted conceptual and empirical work to en-hance understanding of processes examined in the model. In this article (companion to Walker and colleagues ’ article about scale development on the model in this issue), we review recent work on constructs central to the model’s initial question: Why do parents become involved in children’s education? Based on this review, we offer suggestions for (1) research that may deepen understanding of parents ’ motivations for involvement and (2) school and family prac-tices that may strengthen the incidence and ef-fectiveness of parental involvement across var-ied school communities. Whether construed as home-based behav-iors (e.g., helping with homework), school-based activities (e.g., attending school events), or parent-teacher communication (e.g., talking with the teacher about home-work), parental involvement has been pos-itively linked to indicators of student achievement, including teacher ratings of student competence, student grades, and achievement test scores (e.g., Deslandes,