Preservice and inservice teachers’ beliefs about parental involvement and their selection of parental involvement strategies

Published in Proceedings of EdMedia + Innovate Learning

This study compared preservice, beginning and experienced teachers’ perspectives on parental involvement in elementary schools. A total of 227 preservice and inservice teachers participated in this study. The “Parental Involvement Questionnaire” created by Epstein was used to examine the perspectives of preservice, beginning and experienced teachers. In addition, focus group interviews were conducted with fifteen preservice, beginning and experienced teachers. The results from the study suggest that while participants hold positive perspectives on each of the six dimensions of parental involvement, the findings also suggest that as the teachers’ years of experience increase, they value more on parental involvement. Based on the results, this study makes recommendations on what would be useful during teacher education programs in terms of increasing their parental involvement knowledge, and skill.