The Relationship Between Parental Involvement and Academic Performance in Basic and Secondary Education Students

Abstract

Parental involvement is widely regarded as one of the most consistent correlates of student academic success, yet many of the datasets used to study this relationship are either proprietary, longitudinal, or too large to be feasible for a single, unfunded researcher to analyze. This study examines the association between two observable proxies of parental involvement — whether a parent answered the school's electronic survey and the parent's reported satisfaction with the school — and the academic performance level of 480 students, using the publicly available xAPI-Edu-Data dataset (Amrieh, Hamtini, & Aljarah, 2016). A quantitative, cross-sectional, descriptive-correlational design was used, combining descriptive statistics, cross-tabulation, and chi-square tests of independence. Results confirmed this expectation: students whose parents answered the school survey or reported satisfaction with the school were significantly more likely to fall into the High performance category, χ22,N=480=95.36,p<.001, Cramér's V=.45 for survey response, and χ22,N=480=68.47,p<.001, Cramér's V=.38 for reported satisfaction. These findings provide low-cost, replicable evidence on the role of family engagement in school performance, of practical relevance to teachers, school counselors, and educational administrators interested in low-resource, evidence-based family-involvement strategies.