Parent Involvement, School Readiness, and Socioeconomic Status
Open Access
- Author:
- Bond, Margaret
- Area of Honors:
- Sociology
- Degree:
- Bachelor of Arts
- Document Type:
- Thesis
- Thesis Supervisors:
- David P Baker, Thesis Supervisor
Stacy Silver, Thesis Honors Advisor - Keywords:
- parent involvement
school readiness
socioeconomic status
education
inequality
family engagement - 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.