The proposed research will examine the perceptions of a sample of elementary school teachers in Southern Illinois' Educational Service Center #17. The purpose of the research is to determine teachers perceptions (attitudes, opinions, views) of parental involvement in the school as it relates to: (1) helping teachers work effectively; (2) parents being a local resource with respect to the school's instructional and educational processes; and (3) the general benefits accompanying efforts to increase parental involvement. So that the proposed study may be placed within the context of the existing knowledge base, this chapter of the proposal presents a review of the literature on elementary school teachers' perceptions of parental involvement.
Elementary School Teachers' Perceptions of Parental Involvement
Unfortunately, a substantial amount of the research conducted on teacher perceptions of parental involvement was conducted in the 1980s. Although perceptual data is subject to change as the interval between the time of the study and the current year increases (which means that this data may be somewhat unreliable in the 1990s), examination of this work nonetheless is important in that it provides background context in which to evaluate the studies conducted during the last five years. Therefore, it seems important to review some of this work here.
With respect to the foregoing, an early study of teacher perceptions of parent involvement and its effects on classroom learning was conducted by Becker and Epstein (1982). The authors were interested in how teachers would feel about the efforts parents made at home to teach their children. Of specific interest was determining whether teachers believed this practice was a helpful or nonhelpful strategy in terms of its effects on classroom learning?
To measure elementary school teachers' perceptions of parent involvement in home learning as a teaching strategy and also to ...