PARENT INVOLVEMENT AND STUDENT ACHIEVEMENT: EFFECTS OF INDIRECT PARENT INVOLVEMENT ON STUDENT ACHIEVEMENT IN MATHEMATICS

Parents are often seen through a deficit lens despite all that they do for their children. Parents want to do all they can to help their children be successful in school and in math specifically. This can be challenging due to the increasing pressure for students to perform well in math, the current methods for teaching math, and the math work students bring home. This quantitative study investigates how home-based parent involvement strategies predict student\u27s math grade point average (GPA). The data in this study was derived from 23,503 participants within the High School Longitudinal Study of 2009 (HSLS:09). With indirect parent involvement strategies, the following had a statistically significant relationship with student math GPA: parent’s expectations of student education level, how often parents discussed applying to college, and parents encouraging their children to take a math course. With indirect parent involvement strategies, this study found a statistically significant negative relationship between how often a parent helped with math homework and student math GPA. A statistically significant relationship was also found between a student’s mathematics identity and their math GPA. It was also found that parents in this study were least confident in helping their children with math homework compared to English and science homework. The findings from this study suggest that indirect parent involvement strategies are more beneficial to students than direct parent involvement strategies and that the development of a positive mathematics identity can also help with student achievement