A Multidimensional Analysis of Parent–Child Interactions During Academic Tasks and Their Relationships With Children's Self-Regulated Learning

Abstract

This study explored the extent to which parents were able to scaffold their children's Self-Regulated Learning (SRL) in the context of authentic academic tasks and attempted to identify specific dimensions within the parent–child interaction (socioemotional and instructional) that were related to children's SRL. Fifteen Chilean parents and their underachieving primary-aged children participated in set of six SRL-enhancing activities in the areas of reading comprehension and mathematical problem solving. Individual assessments of children's SRL in the same curriculum areas were carried out before and after these activities. The assessment outcomes revealed that, although at the group level children showed positive changes in some aspects of SRL (metacognitive knowledge and regulation of cognition), individual variation was also noticeable within the group. Children's evidence of SRL during the parent–child activities was related to both social and instructional dimensions of the interaction. SRL posttest outcomes, however, showed stronger associations with instructional behaviors.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This research was generously funded by Gates Cambridge Trust and the Centre of Latin American Studies, University of Cambridge, through their “Chile Projects” grant scheme. We warmly thank parents, children, and teachers who participated in this study and University Diego Portales in Chile for securing access to the participant schools.

Notes

Literacy involved reading comprehension and writing skills in Spanish.

The selection of tasks was discussed and agreed with the class teachers in order to ensure that their content and level of difficulty was appropriate.

The tasks’ level of difficulty ranged from what children were expected to have achieved during the previous academic year to what children were expected to achieve in their current year level.

Parent–child activities arranged in schools took place in a quiet room at a time mutually agreed by the families, teachers, and the researcher.

The development of categories was carried out with a random subsample of video data (equivalent to 20% of the entire data set) until categories were sufficiently saturated.

As will be explained later, the contingency coding scheme used a predetermined set of combinations of individual instructional behaviors of parents and children (contingency rules) as the basis to establish dyadic units.

Since children could show evidence of MO and HO during the same session, indicators of these two motivational orientations were accounted for in the scheme.

The external coder was a native Spanish speaker from Chile with previous training in Psychology.

Because the coding procedure followed a set of contingency rules, it was objective and no assessment on inter-coder agreement was considered necessary.

A degree of latitude of 3 seconds was established. When it was not clear through the analysis of outputs whether the two coders had assigned codes to the same behaviors, those clips were jointly observed.

The term “target group” refers to the 15 children who participated in the program of parent–child activities and it is used when contrasting their profiles to those of the initial comparison group.

∗Negative values indicate deterioration.

Since a preliminary analyses using Friedman Tests (N related samples) revealed no significant differences in any of the behavioral categories across the four sessions, a decision was made to use overall mean rates for this analysis (see Tables 12 and 15 for means and SDs).

(∗) Means based on rates (Number of behaviors per minute).

(∗) Means based on rates (Number of behaviors per minute).