Parental Support and Online Sixth-Grade Students’ Academic Performance: A Survey Research

Despite the growing popularity of full-time virtual schools, too many students have not found success. The purpose of this quantitative correlational study was to explore the relationship between parental involvement and online middle school students’ academic performance at one public online school in the southern United States. The research question asked if there was a relationship between parental involvement in the form of encouragement, modeling, reinforcement, and instruction and sixth-grade students’ academic performance assessed through GPA in an online K-12 public school. The null hypothesis stated there was no statistically significant relationship between parental involvement and students’ academic performance. Data were collected from 143 participants through a survey questionnaire online. SPSS V26 was used for data analysis. The researcher performed Spearman’s correlation to determine if there was a relationship between parental involvement and students’ academic performance. Each of the four parental involvement factors were analyzed to determine if there was a relationship to students’ academic success. The results showed no significant relationship between students’ academic performance and the constructs of reinforcement, instruction, and modeling. Parental encouragement was the only mechanism statistically significant in revealing a negative relationship with online sixth-grade student academic performance. The null hypothesis was rejected. Recommendations for further research are provided