A Review of the Relationship between Parental Involvement and Students’ Academic Performance

Parental involvement in the education of their children is a key function of child total functioning as well as their academic success. This paper review the research literature on the relationship among parenting practices such as parenting style, parents’ expectations, parental home and school involvement activities and students’ academic performance with the focus on elementary and middle school level. To conduct a comprehensive review on above relationship, researchers have used JSTOR data base and Google Scholar. The reviews of empirical researches indicate that different constructs of parental involvement play an important role in various ways. Several studies however indicate a decline in parental involvement during the middle or above school levels. Furthermore, the review indicates that authoritative parenting style is positively associated academic performance across all school level, although this finding is not consistent across ethnicity, culture and socioeconomic status. Parental home based and school based involvements have also been positively related to academic performance with some inconsistency. One the other hand parental expectations for their child educational attainment have the strongest impact on academic performance compared with other types of parental involvement constructs such as participation in school events, parent-child communication, and help in homework.