Including Fathers in the Picture: A Meta-Analysis of Parental Involvement and Students' Academic Achievement

Extant research on parental involvement in education has been conducted largely without respect to which parent is involved. The implicit assumption is that family-school relationship frameworks function similarly for fathers and mothers. Although there is a growing body of research examining fathers' involvement in education, this assumption has not been tested. In this meta-analysis, we examined the relative strength of the association between educational involvement of fathers versus mothers and achievement of school-age children (kindergarten to 12th grade). The association of involvement with achievement over time (i.e., longitudinal studies) was stronger than for cross-sectional studies. Parental involvement in education was positively associated with student achievement and the relation between involvement and achievement was equally strong for fathers and mothers, although mothers' mean levels of involvement were higher than fathers'. Moderator analyses across the different types of involvement suggested that school-based involvement and intellectual enrichment at home was more strongly related to achievement for mothers than for fathers, although there were no differences in mean levels of involvement.