Views of the parents of secondary school students on supporting their children's learning

Abstract

The aim of this research is determining the support behaviors and activities parents realized for their children’s learning and revealing it relationships with some demographical properties of parents. The translational simultaneous mixed method was used. This study in which quantitative and qualitative methods used together, firstly survey was applied and the semi-structured interviews was done. Data obtained by these data collection tools were analysed simultenously. The participants of this study are 360 parents who are parents of students studying in 5th, 6th, 7th and 8th grades at a secondary school in İstanbul. Semi-structured interviews were realized with 43 parents chosen from these participants. The questionnaire consists of three dimensions and 66 items. In the analysis of quantitative data percentage, frequency, arithmetic means and one-way variance analysis (ANOVA) were used. Descriptive analysis was used for analysing qualitative data. According to data obtained from the research, parents realized the activities which are related to motivate their children to learning and the activities that parents do with the other education stakeholders more than the activities that parents do for helping their children’s lessons. The academical supporting activities parents do are mostly general ones. The general academical supporting activities parents stated that they do generally are following their children’s homeworks/examinations, encouraging them for studying, researching form different learning sources,  doing test, providing appropriate learning environments at home, sending their children to school courses and following their academic scores. The motivational supporting activities parents stated that they do mostly are praising their children when they achieve something, encouraging them when they couldn’t be successful in their lessons and talking about what they do at school. The activities mostly stated by parents that they realized collaboratively with other people and insititutions which are related to their children’s learning are attending parents’ meeting and speaking out their negative and positive thoughts about school and teachers. Parents’ opinions about the supporting activities they realised don’t differ according to their educational levels and occupations but they differ according to their ages. It can be said that younger parents (ages between 20 and 30) do supporting activities more than others.