Empowering parents to support their child’s learning of mathematics: Investigating the effects of an academically focussed Home-School Partnership

Abstract

Home-School Partnerships (HSPs) with an academic focus have been shown to improve students’ academic outcomes. There is a genuine need to improve academic outcomes for students in New Zealand as international measures continue to identify a large minority of students who underachieve, including in mathematics. This study examines the effects of an HSP intervention on parents’ ability to support their child’s learning in mathematics. There were three phases in the study comprising a profiling phase, an intervention phase and an evaluation phase. The setting for the study was an urban, co-educational, decile 7, state secondary school with approximately 1100 students. The study used Bronfenbrenner’s General Ecological model as its theoretical frame. The profiling phase of the research involved surveying 60 parents of Year 9 students who had been identified as achieving below national averages in mathematics upon entry to secondary school. Key findings from this survey were that parents strongly believed that learning mathematics was important and their involvement with their child’s learning was important. Over half of the profiling parents believed they could offer useful support for their child’s mathematical learning but the rest (30% -45%) believed they are unable to offer help. Homework was identified as the main enabling factor for providing support, with parental or family mathematics ability identified as another enabler but also the main barrier. The intervention phase was a mathematically focussed HSP involving six of the families from the profiling phase. The intervention had two important features. Firstly, a framework was developed and used to align support strategies to the individual requirements of each family. Secondly, participants were involved in co-constructing the intervention they used at home with their child. The intervention consisted of four workshops over 11 weeks attended by parents, the researcher and a research assistant. Data from the intervention was used to identify which strategies parents adopted for use. Results showed that strategies fell into three broad categories; access, engagement and supervision. All parents used a range of strategies over the course of the intervention. Results from the intervention also allowed the researcher to recognise the importance of capitalising on proximal processes. The evaluation phase used data from six sources; the workshop notes, pre- and postintervention questionnaires, research journals, meeting notes and emails and other correspondence, to form case study narratives. These were coded using a mixture of deductive and inductive analysis and with student achievement data were used to provide answers to the remaining sub-research questions. There were three key findings from the evaluation. Firstly, the presence of an appropriate artefact and access to mathematical expertise were required for parental support of their child’s learning of mathematics to be effective. The second key finding was that over the course of the intervention there were consistent, positive shifts in participants’ attitudes toward their own skill, confidence and ability to find help to support their child’s learning of mathematics. The final key finding was that parents adopted multiple strategies to support their child’s learning of mathematics. There were also positive benefits found relating to the relationships between the parent and child.