Christmas WS's!
Any discerning parents can work this out for themselves, but it’s always good to see the proof. You have seen me write about the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) results before. These are international math and reading results from kids in over 50 countries around the world.
They’ve been turning the tables on kids in starting to include parents in the study. Starting with four countries in 2006 and adding 14 more countries in 2009, PISA interviewed the parents of 5,000 students about their focus on learning and compared that with the kids’ actual reading results.
There will be little shock at the results. They came to three conclusions:
- Fifteen-year-old students whose parents often read books with them during their first year of primary school show markedly higher scores in PISA 2009 than students whose parents read with them infrequently or not at all.
- The performance advantage among students whose parents read to them in their early school years is evident regardless of the family’s socio-economic background.
- Parents’ engagement with their 15-year-olds is strongly associated with better performance in PISA.
In addition to the above study Thomas Friedman in an op ed piece for the NY Times, also mentions a recent study by the National School Boards Association’s Center for Public Education, which we’ll go into more detail tomorrow. To give you a taste, this study also found that parent involvement, such as monitoring homework, rewarding their kids’ efforts and talking about going to college, has a higher impact on their children’s academic achievement than attending PTA meetings or volunteering in the classroom.
There you have it. Parents who participate more with their kids in reading from an early age and are more engaged in their schooling have a lasting effect on their kids’ academic performance. As Thomas Friedman puts it: “To be sure, there is no substitute for a good teacher. There is nothing more valuable than great classroom instruction. But let’s stop putting the whole burden on teachers. We also need better parents. Better parents can make every teacher more effective.”
