At home in school: Supporting Home-Based Parental Involvement and Educational Partnerships

Summary Part I centred around the definition and operationalization of home-based parental involvement in early childhood education. In Chapter 2 we reviewed the operationalizations of home-based parental involvement as described in the measures sections of empirical papers (k = 67) identified in a systematic search. Through an iterative process of constant comparison, five themes were extracted that together give a comprehensive, evidence-based description of home based parental involvement. This description includes the activities undertaken, appropriate instructions and climate in which these activities take place, and includes the child as autonomous actor. In Chapter 3 we evaluated the psychometric properties of two parent report questionnaires on home-based parental involvement for their use across parents with and without a migration background. Through the use of Principal Component Analysis it was found that in the Quantitative Home-based Involvement Questionnaire formal and informal involvement formed distinct components of home-based parental involvement in kindergarten aged children. Additionally, multi-group confirmatory factor analyses showed that the second instrument (the Parenting Questionnaire) can be validly used to measure home based parental involvement style across parents with and without a migration background in the Dutch context. Part II concerns School Learning Communities (SLCs) as an intervention to develop or improve educational partnerships. In Chapter 4 we gave more insight into the working mechanisms of SLCs by exploring how equality and diversity were expressed by parents and teachers in SLCs and to what extent they reflected on their views and practices. Thematic coding of transcripts from the SLC meetings revealed that equality and attention for diversity became important topics in these meetings. Equality in communication was for example discussed in the context of ‘creating more two-way communication’. Attention to individual experiences and differences was, for example, discussed both within context of the SLC as well as in the context of daily practice. Parents and teachers reflected on their opinions and practices, most notably regarding ‘communication’. Reflection was more or less thorough, depending on the school context. Additionally, SLC participants developed practical output, such as an introductory meeting format for new parents, and applied these practical outputs in everyday practices. In Chapter 5 we tested the effectiveness of the intervention by evaluating the efficacy of SLCs on improving teachers’ perceptions of the parent-teacher relationship. Results of the growth models with multilevel analyses in SPSS suggest that the quality of the parent-teacher relationship increased over time. As expected, the parent-teacher relationships as rated by teachers who took part in the program in the first year showed a larger increase in quality than those of teachers in the waitlist group. Specifically, the relationships of teachers with parents who had an ethnic background different from their own benefited more from the SLCs than relationships with same ethnicity parents.