Parental participation improves student academic achievement: A case of Iganga and Mayuge districts in Uganda

摘要

Educational research has linked parental participation in children’s schooling with a wide range of children’s academic outcomes. Parental involvement involves time and resource commitment towards children’s academic performance. This paper extracts data from a cross-sectional survey involving 2,669 grade six students attending public and private primary schools serving households located in Iganga–Mayuge health and demographic surveillance system in rural Eastern Uganda. The paper adopts two of the six types of parental involvement detailed in the Epstein parental involvement framework. This paper hypothesises that parental participation through parenting and communication types of involvement will give children an advantage towards academic achievement. Using a regression model and controlling for individual, school and household covariates, the results indicate that a unit increase in parental participation through parenting and communication types of involvement significantly increases students’ numeracy scores by 6 and 15 percentage points, respectively. Similarly, a unit increase in parental participation through parenting and communication types of involvement significantly increases students’ literacy scores, by 6 and 12 percentage points, respectively. This implies that parental participation plays a pivotal role in motivating children to improve their academic grades. For students to reap maximum benefits in an education system, the learning should not be solely left to the student–teacher relationship but should be extended to include active parental involvement among other education stakeholders.