Week 5 Assignment 2: Blog Post

This week’s research assignment was about searching for empirical research articles relating to my research topic titled, “How can teachers form healthy relationships with parents that get them excited and actively involved in their child’s education?” Empirical means that the research has been verified or proven by observation or experiment. To start my search for empirical research journals pertaining to my topic, I selected an education subject specific database. A subject specific database helps the researcher to narrow the search to articles only relating to that field of study. The leatherby library offered three education specific databases to choose from. I chose the Education Full Text database. I entered the key words parent involvement and preschool and education. I clicked on peer reviewed, full text and entered the years 2000 to 2012.  I wished that they also had the option to select empirical research and primary source, but that would be too easy. To find out if the article I selected was from a primary source empirical research, I had to look for several clues. The first clue is in the abstract of the article. It states the reasoning and methodology for the research. The second clue would be a list of tests or measures the researchers used to prove their findings. The third clue would be a list and quantity of the subjects that were studied. After all of this I found an excellent article titled, “Parent-school relationships and children’s academic and social outcomes in public school pre-kindergarten.” It was published in, The Journal of School Psychology, (2010). This research studied two dimensions of parent-school relationships they are parent school involvement and parents’ perception of the teacher’s responsiveness to the child and the parent. After categorizing the children’s parents involvement levels, they compared their research tests scores and concluded that the children whose parents were activity involved with the school had better scores in academic and social skills. The scores were not drastically different. I feel that all of the children in a classroom benefit from having parents present. As a parent volunteer I know that I have helped many children just by being there to answer questions and to model positive social skills.

Article Cited:

Powell, Douglas R., Son, Seung-Hee, File, Nancy, San Juan, Robert R. (2010). “Parent-school

            Relationship and children’s academic and social outcomes in public school pre-

Kindergarten.”  Journal of School Psychology 48, no. 4:269-292.

            DOI:10.1016/j.jsp.2010.03.002