Parents' Educational Involvement: A Developmental Ecology Perspective

The objective of this review is to examine research on home-based and school-based parental involvement and generate new research questions by employing Bronfenbrenner's ecological framework consisting of the micro-, meso-, exo-, and macrosystems. This analysis shows that, although both family-based and school-based parental involvement are positively related to educational outcomes, their examination in the ecological framework prompts consideration of additional aspects of the micro- and mesosystems and their embeddedness in four exosystemic aspects (parents' networks and workplace, neighborhood, and educational policy) and two macrosystemic types (immigrant and ethnic groups). Guided by Bronfenbrenner's ecological thinking and the availability of advanced multivariate analysis methods, the next stage of this research should test multiple-step models describing factors that prompt parental involvement and mediate and moderate the parental involvement - educational outcomes links in different sociocultural settings.