Scaffolding homework for mastery: engaging parents

ABSTRACT

The value of parental engagement in the learning of children and young people has repeatedly been shown to be of value in the literature, and in practice. One of the ways many parents feel they can be involved in their children’s learning is through support with homework, and homework forms a ubiquitous part of schooling in most systems. However, parental engagement with homework has been shown to be problematic in the literature. This paper combines the literature on parental engagement, with that on both the effectiveness and purposes of homework and that on the importance of mastery orientations for young people, to argue that the effective forms of parental engagement in young people’s homework will be engagement that supports and leads to mastery orientations on the part of children. The paper includes a schematic for this engagement and concludes with principles for designing homework tasks.

KEYWORDS:

• Parental engagement
• homework
• mastery orientations

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Dr, Shona Macintosh for her comments on an early version of this manuscript, and the parents, pupils and staff of Mile End School, whose work furthered the author’s understanding of these issues.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. “Parents” should be understood to include all adults with a caring responsibility for the child, in or out of a family group.

2. It is interesting that these figures do not align with the figures given by students about how much time they spend on homework.

3. And also evaluated effectively, to show if those outcomes are being achieved.

4. While it is true that there are an increasing number of opportunities for young people to do this work on the school grounds – after school homework clubs for example, this article concentrates on work assigned by school staff to be completed outside of school hours and most usually in the students’ home.