American Journal of Community Psychology, Vol. 27, No. 6, 1999
A Longitudinal Assessment of Teacher Perceptions
of Parent Involvement in Children's Education and
School Performance
Charles V. Izzo and Roger P. Weissberg
University of Illinois at Chicago
Wesley J. Kasprow
Yale Child Study Center
Michael Fendrich
University of Illinois at Chicago
This study examines the ways in which parental involvement in children's
education changes over time and how it relates to children's social and
academic functioning in school. Teachers provided information on parent
involvement and school performance for 1,205 urban, kindergarten through
third-grade children for 3 consecutive years. They rated the following four
dimensions of parent involvement: frequency of parent-teacher contact, qual-
ity of the parent-teacher interactions, participation in educational activities
at home, and participation in school activites. As predicted, the frequency
of parent-teacher contacts, quality of parent-teacher interactions, and parent
participation at school declined from Years 1 to 3. Every parent involvement
variable correlated moderately with school performance and parent involve-
ment in Years 1 and 2, and accounted for a small, but significant amount of
'This project was supported, in part, by the National Institute of Mental Health Prevention
Research Branch and Office on AIDS Research Training Grant T32MH19933 to Roger
Weissberg, by the University of Illinois at Chicago Center for Urban Education, Research,
and Development, and by the Office of Educational Research and Improvement of the U.S.
Department of Education through a grant to the Mid-Atlantic Laboratory for Student Success
at the Temple University Center for Research in Human Development and Education.
'Correspondence concerning this document should be addressed to Charles V. Izzo, Depart-
ment of Psychology (M/C 285), University of Illinois at Chicago, 1007 West Harrison Street,
Chicago, Illinois, 60607-7137.
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0091-0562/99/1200-0817$:6.00/0 © 1999 Plenum Publishing Corporation