How Can Parental Educational Involvement Promote Academic Engagement Among Primary And Secondary School Students?

With the introduction of Family Education Promotion Law of the People’s Republic of China,the social and public nature of family education has been continuously emphasised.Parental educational involvement is one of the most malleable factors in family education,highlighting parental initiative and providing a new perspective on educational practice and change.As an important observer of students’ learning processes,an important component of classroom reform and an important indicator of educational quality,academic engagement has been widely used in the evaluation of educational quality.In the context of the "double reduction" policy,it is of great theoretical and practical value to explore the influence of parental educational involvement on primary and secondary school students’ academic engagement,and to awaken students’ internal motivational resources for their personal development,school teaching reform and the improvement of education quality.After item analysis,exploratory factor analysis,validation factor analysis and reliability analysis,the study constructed a 20-item questionnaire on perceived parental educational involvement behaviors containing three factors,namely parent-child interaction,family supervision and home-school interaction.The three-factor model fitted well,with the factor loadings of each item ranging from 0.520 to 0.794.The internal consistency coefficients of the total questionnaire and the three factors ranged from 0.735 to 0.920,which can be used to assess primary and secondary school students’ perceptions of parental educational involvement behaviors.Parent-child interaction,family supervision and home-school interaction are exactly what is of great concern in current family education practice,and the questionnaire developed by the study provides a valid measurement tool for measuring the quality of parental educational involvement behaviour in family education.Based on the Self-System Model of Motivational Development,the process model of parental educational involvement and the ecosystem model of parental educational involvement,this study constructs a theoretical model with perception of parental educational involvement as a predictor variable,self-system as a mediating variable and academic engagement as an outcome variable,and uses questionnaires to investigate the relationship between perception of parental education involvement behaviors,self-system and academic engagement.The research results are as follows.(1)Primary and secondary school students’ perceived parental educational involvement behaviour is generally at an intermediate level,and parents pay more attention to family supervision in their involvement in education.Students’ gender,whether or not they are an only child,whether or not they are class leaders,grade level,and parents’ education level influence parental educational involvement behaviour.(2)Primary and secondary school students’ academic engagement is generally at an intermediate level,with students’ willingness to learn independently low and their concentration on learning low.Students’ gender,whether they are class leaders,grade level,and parents’ education level affect students’ academic engagement.(3)Perceived parental educational involvement behaviour can directly and positively influence students’ academic engagement.(4)Perceived parental educational involvement behaviour can indirectly and positively influence students’ academic engagement through the mediation of the self-system.Based on the analysis of the research results,this paper proposes research suggestions at three levels,family,school and society.At the family level,(1)improve family supervision and build learning families;(2)attach importance to parent-child interaction and actively participate in home-school interaction;(3)pay attention to students’ self-system and stimulate internal motivational resources.At the school level,(1)improve home-school educational synergy to assist parental educational involvement;(2)innovate home-school cooperation to empower parental educational involvement.At the social level,(1)promote family education and family culture to create a good atmosphere for parental educational involvement;(2)give play to the effect of collaborative parenting to help improve the effectiveness of parental educational involvement.