First year high school students' perception of parental involvement ineducation in a rural area of Heilongjiang province in China

Abstract

The purpose of this research study is to explore first graders’ understanding of parental involvement in a rural high school, to investigate students’ feeling and attitude towards their parents’ participation in high school education, to understand rural students’ expectation of parent-teacher collaboration, and further to examine potential differences caused by gender, degree of parental involvement, and level of academic performance. Qualitative data was collected by means of individual interviews and questionnaires among first-grade students in a rural high school in Heilongjiang Province. The research involves 12 interview participants and 115 students for questionnaires. After transcribing verbally all the individual interviews, both line-by-line coding and software N-Vivo were utilized to analyze transcriptions in order to generate main codes and themes to describe students’ understanding and perception and further explore differences across individual interview participants. Questionnaire data was entered into Excel program to create figures supporting findings of interviews. Findings show that rural high school students understand parental involvement as interactions involving parents, teachers and students in four aspects- material, supportive, communicative and environmental. Effective communication, initiation of providing supports, good relationship, and comfortable environment were highlighted in students’ expectations. Secondly, the feelings of confident, proud, warm, happy, relax, pressure, and distrust were related by students to their parents’ various practices of involvement in high school education. Moreover, students identified three different attitudes towards parental involvement: positive, negative, and dependent. It was found that students’ attitude towards the communicative parental involvement was highly depended on the content and the frequency. Besides, students tend to express their neutral attitude towards activities that were not implemented in the high school such as participation in school decision making and parent-teacher association. Thirdly, academic scores and motivation of study were discovered to be affected by parents’ involvement. Parent involvement with positive feeling and positive attitude were more likely to be related to positive effects on academic outcomes by students. The research suggests a three-way communication among parents, teachers and students at school and in the community. Findings imply that it is necessary for rural high schools and rural parents to work together with students in the establishment of home-school cooperation. Students’ reaction and expectation provide valuable implications for practices of parental involvement in rural high school. Individual differences are also recommended to be taken into considerations in the practices.