Parent Involvement, School Readiness, and Socioeconomic Status

Open Access
- Author:
- Bond, Margaret
- Graduate Program:
- Educational Theory and Policy (MA)
- Degree:
- Master of Arts
- Document Type:
- Master Thesis
- Date of Defense:
- February 26, 2023
- Committee Members:
- David P Baker, Thesis Advisor/Co-Advisor
Stacy Silver, Committee Member
Mimi Schaub, Professor in Charge/Director of Graduate Studies - Keywords:
- parent involvement
school readiness
socioeconomic status - Abstract:
- Understanding interactions between families and schools is crucial to understanding education. Prior research indicates that socioeconomic inequality unevenly distributes educational resources like family involvement to students, advantaging those who have access to the type of involvement valued by schools. Using the ECLS-K dataset, I examine the interactions of family involvement, school readiness, and socioeconomic status. I hypothesize that parent involvement would increase students’ school readiness as a mediating factor between socioeconomic status and school readiness, using parent book-reading as an indicator of involvement and various income and education-related variables to approximate socioeconomic status. Through analyzing descriptive statistics, analysis of variance, and regression models, I find no significant evidence that parent involvement increases school readiness, and I find limited support for the hypothesis that socioeconomic status connects to higher school readiness, in terms of some income and parent education measures. Further investigation is needed to unravel the complex interactions between families, school, and inequality.