Parental participation improves student academic achievement: A case of Iganga and Mayuge districts in Uganda

Educational research has linked parental participation in children’s schooling with a wide range of children’s academic outcomes. Parental involvement involves time and resource commitment towards children’s academic performance. This paper extracts data from a cross-sectional survey involving 2,669 grade six students attending public and private primary schools serving households located in Iganga–Mayuge health and demographic surveillance system in rural Eastern Uganda. The paper adopts two of the six types of parental involvement detailed in the Epstein parental involvement framework. This paper hypothesises that parental participation through parenting and communication types of involvement will give children an advantage towards academic achievement. Using a regression model and controlling for individual, school and household covariates, the results indicate that a unit increase in parental participation through parenting and communication types of involvement significantly increases students’ numeracy scores by 6 and 15 percentage points, respectively. Similarly, a unit increase in parental participation through parenting and communication types of involvement significantly increases students’ literacy scores, by 6 and 12 percentage points, respectively. This implies that parental participation plays a pivotal role in motivating children to improve their academic grades. For students to reap maximum benefits in an education system, the learning should not be solely left to the student–teacher relationship but should be extended to include active parental involvement among other education stakeholders

Effects of socioeconomic status, class size and ability grouping on science achievement: a sociological approach

This study examines the effects of key social group variables (e.g. socioeconomic status, class size, ability grouping and school type) on the science achievement of secondary school students in Canberra, Australia after controlling for student level effects (e.g. prior performance, attitudes toward school, liking of science and educational aspirations). The study employed a multilevel analysis procedure to examine the data at the student, classroom and school levels for both direct effects and cross-level interaction effects. The major finding is that sociological factors in this school system operated at the classroom level, together with cross-level interaction effects operating at the school and classroom levels, with no main effects operating at the school level to explain nearly all the variability between classrooms and schools.John P. Keeves, Njora Hungi, I Gusti Ngurah Darmawa