Family involvements in education and quality of education: Some selected 2^nd cycle public schools in west shoa zone, Ethiopia

Abstract

In improving the quality of education, parents’ involvement is very significant. Parents’ involvement is one of the three responsibilities for realizing the best quality. This study attempts to explore parents’ involvement in education activities for improving their children’s academic achievement. A sample of 292 households was selected from whose students’ grade five to grade eight of four schools. Descriptive analysis showed that 19% of the respondents do not actively involve at all in giving advice, guiding, and counseling their children at home. 67% of the respondents showed medium parental involvement in helping their children, while 14% of respondents showed a good status of parental involvement in education at home. Similarly, the study revealed that 53% of the respondents were not participating in school activities at all and 35% of them were medium participation and 13% of them were well involved in school activities. The multiple linear regression revealed that the gender of the household head, educational level of the father, and sources of income of parents were found to be the major predictors of parents’ involvement in education for improving academic achievements while the aging of the head of the household, number of children and gender of students were not showing significance. Government, school leaders, and policymakers should explore mechanisms to increase parents’ involvement in students’ learning and make it obvious to parents their attitude toward their child’s academic performance.

Keywords:

• socio-economic factors
• family involvements
• quality of education
• public schools
• West Shoa Zone

PUBLIC INTEREST STATEMENT

Parental involvement is the most important children’s academically and behavioral development. This indicated that parents left the responsibility solely to the teachers and directors. Therefore, the lack of parental participation resulted in low interaction, low school success, and low academic achievement. The lack of parental involvement at home and in school activities is disappointing. The study revealed that parental involvement in education at home and school has a great contribution to students’ academic achievements. This implies that parents’ involvement is education has relevant for quality of education. Attention to individuals with low socioeconomic backgrounds to preserve, economically and morally, to make consistency for the obtainable opportunity. Mechanisms of increasing parents’ involvement in students’ learning and make obvious to parents their attitude toward their child’s academic performance.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

The project was funded by Ambo University. We are grateful to Ambo University and all individuals and institutions for providing the necessary information for this work.

Notes on contributors

Reta Lemessa

Reta Lemessa has a Master’s in Statistics from Addis Ababa University. He has more than 10 years of experience of Universities teaching, private research centers, and developmental institutions. Currently, Mr. Reta has working as Lecturer at Ambo University; in private research centre as data analysist. He has served as a lecturer at Wollega University, Ethiopia, and as head, of the department of statistics at Ambo University for three years since 2017. He has performed and published different themes of research. His research interests are the application of statistics in any type of data, spatial modeling, and binary and multilevel modeling.

Temesgen Senbeto

Temesgen Senbeto is senior lecturer at Ambo University in Department of Statistics. He has masters of Sciences in Biostatistics and Masters of Sciences in Developmental Economics. He has strong background of statistics and Economics.

Endale Alemayehu

Endale Alemayehu is a researcher at Intego project department of public health and primary care, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium from September 2022. He has served as lecturer and head, department of statistics at Ambo University from 2018 before he joined Hasselt University to attend his master of statistics and data science as international scholar. He was appointed as a graduate assistant and assistant lecturer position from 2014 before he left for master of Biostatistics to Jimma University. His research interest included but not limited to Spatial modeling, Bayesian models, mixed model, application of distributed lag non-linear models and modeling heat wave.