Does Parental Involvement in School Activities improve Students’ Academic Achievement? Studies have indicated statistically significant association between parent involvement and a child’s academic performance, over and above the impact of the child’s intelligence. Parent involvement in their child’s studies increased the child’s perception of cognitive competence, improving their performance on standardised achievement tests, and increased the quality of student-teacher relationships, improving the teacher ratings of the child’s classroom academic performance (Topor et al., 2010). However, clarity is required concerning a precise definition of parental involvement, and crucially which factors this term specifically encompasses. Inspired by Muller’s study of “Gender Differences in Parental Involvement and Adolescents’ Mathematics Achievement”, we aim to investigate does parental involvement in school activities improve students’ academic achievement? Our paper is structured as follows. Firstly, we introduce our data source, the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), and define parental involvement in school activities through the OECD constructed PASCHPOL index. We test the relationship between parental involvement in school activities and students’ educational achievement, where we find a negative correlation. Consequently, we breakdown the PASCHPOL index even further, testing for gender and socio-economic school status within our case study Ireland, to try to explain this relationship. After addressing the limitations of the index we used, finally we offer suggestions for new indices that may more accurately reflect parental involvement in student activities. Background to Paper Our paper is inspired by Chandra Muller’s “Gender Differences in Parental Involvement and Adolescents’ Mathematics Achievement”, published in 1998. Muller challenges the preconceived notion that parental involvement always benefits students academically; indeed, she clarifies two important dimensions of parental involvement: whether the locus of activity is the home or the school. whether such activity can be characterised as parental management of a child’s educational career or intervention in a crisis. Her results highlight that the correlation between parental involvement and academic success is comparable for both girls and boys, and it decreases as high school progresses “to the point that parental involvement has essentially no relationship to the gains in achievement made by seniors” (Muller, 1998). Reflecting on Muller’s research, we explore the relationship between parental involvement in school activities and academic achievement in a European context.

Data Source The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) is a study organised by the OECD that surveys students, teachers and schools from 80 different countries. PISA assesses the academic performance of 15-year-old students in mathematics, science, and reading. The study is conducted every three years, and PISA questions are designed to assess students’ problem-solving abilities and their application of knowledge and skills to real-world situations. The questions are typically presented in a context that reflects challenges students may encounter in their daily lives. PISA employs a variety of question formats, including multiple-choice questions, open-ended questions, and scenario-based questions, covered in three main domains: mathematics, science and reading. By comparing responses between and within countries, PISA is an incredibly valuable platform for researchers and policymakers wishing to understand factors behind educational inequalities, for example with regards to student academic performance. PISA aims to provide a comparative perspective on education, helping countries understand how their educational outcomes stack up against international benchmarks. Methodology PASCHPOL Index Initially, we define parental involvement in school activities through the PASCHPOL index. We use the definition provided by PISA, which best describes the index: The index of school policies for parental involvement (PASCHPOL) was constructed using parents’ responses to the trend question (PA007) about the extent to which they agree (“strongly disagree”, “disagree”, “agree”, “strongly agree”) with the following statements: “My child’s school provides an inviting atmosphere for parents to get involved”; “My child’s school provides effective communication between the school and families”; “My child’s school involves parents in the school’s decision-making process”; “My child’s school offers parent education”; “My child’s school informs families about how to help students with homework and other school-related activities”; and “My child’s school co-operates with to strengthen school programmes and student development”. Positive values reflect parents’ perceptions that these school policies for parental involvement exist to a greater extent, negative values indicate that these school policies for parental involvement exist to a lesser extent, than the OECD average (PISA, 2018). Hence, PASCHPOL measures whether parents believe their child’s school encourages parents to engage in school activities, but it does not necessarily mean that parents choose to be involved. Moreover, although one might expect that the implemented policies should benefit students and contribute to enhanced grade performance, this index cannot guarantee it, because it does not measure student’s academic achievement. Nevertheless, a comfortable and welcoming atmosphere for parents should, theoretically, through the integration of parental and teacher education, benefit students. Therefore, we assume for the moment that schools which have encouraging policies have higher levels of parental involvement, and so the PASCHPOL index is an indicator of parental engagement in schools. Country selected The decision to choose a specific country, such as Ireland, for analysis in the PISA 2018 dataset was driven by various factors. The main factor being the availability and quality of data for Ireland in the PISA 2018 dataset. We had already come up with a possible hypothesis to test before choosing the country which meant we could choose one that had data available we required to test our hypothesis.

Our choice of Ireland, a well-developed nation, is driven by our objective to delve into the enduring influence of parental involvement, on the present-day education landscape. Furthermore, the OECD’s latest education sector report (OECD, 2023) highlights an intriguing paradox: despite ranking last in the OECD for education investment, Ireland remarkably secures a position among the top 20 nations with the best secondary education systems globally. It would be interesting to see if in the absence of fiscal investment, parents step up and support students in Irish schools, translating into academic achievement.

Linear regression analysis

The nature of the relationship between the variables and/or indexes made linear regression the most appropriate method for analysis; there is an assumed linear relationship between the independent and dependent variables. In our case, the investigation of a relationship between the index of school policies for parental involvement (PASCHPOL) and pupil performance in different subjects (PV1MATH, PV1SCIE, PV1READ) shows that the changes in the index should be associated with a constant rate of change in pupil performance, which makes linear regression a suitable choice. The variables PV1MATH, PV1SCIE, and PV1READ in the PISA dataset represent student performance in mathematics, science, and reading, respectively. These variables are derived from the test scores that students received in these subjects during the PISA assessments. PV1MATH (Pupil Performance in Mathematics) represents the mathematical literacy of the student, PV1SCIE (Pupil Performance in Science) represents the scientific literacy of the student and PV1READ (Pupil Performance in Reading) represents the reading literacy of the student. We chose these variables because the PISA assessments are standardised and administered globally, allowing for comparisons of student performance across countries which makes PV1MATH, PV1SCIE, and PV1READ suitable for cross-national analyses. Furthermore, the three variables cover key domains of academic achievement - mathematics, science, and reading which together, provide a more comprehensive picture of a student’s overall academic competence.