Peculiarities of parental involvement in children education in Lithuania

Abstract

Promising theoretical frameworks for parental involvement emerged when J. Epstein suggested a widely recognized typology to account for different levels of parental involvement in their children‘s education. Parent‘s involvement in school’s life has become the objective of many researches for several decades. Unfortunately there is a big lack of researches in this field in Lithuania. The aims of this research were to identify prevailing forms of parental involvement in their children‘s education and to find out how parents attitude towards involvement in their children school life relates with children academic achievement and teachers’ work evaluation by parents. The data base of National Agency for School Evaluation (NASE) in Lithuania was analyzed: 29358 parents of 175 schools participated in this survey.According the results of this analysis several conclusions were formulated: 1. individualistic engagement of parents in their children education dominates, where schools activities can be characterized as top-down communication from educators to parents. 2. Parents’ attitudes towards involvement in their children life correlates with student’s achievements. Parents of students with high achievement more often demonstrate positive attitude towards involvement in school life and more often participate in school activities. 3. Parents with neutral or negative attitude towards involvement in their children life more often are dissatisfied with the schools performance. They state that their children do not like their school, more often blame schools for their children failure, think that teachers are not objective in their assessment of student’s academic performance. This group of parents more often thinks that their children are lacking teacher’s support, that teachers do not respect parent’s opinion. 4. It is characteristic for parents with neutral or negative attitude towards involvement in their children school to be less interested to participate in school life as their children grow.