FAMILY INVOLVEMENT AND STUDENT LEARNING

Family Involvement And Student Learning



Family Involvement And Student Learning

Introduction

Thirty years of research confirms that family involvement is a powerful influence on children's achievement in school (Eagle, 1989; Henderson & Berla, 1994; Department of Education, 1994). When families are involved in their children's education, children earn higher grades and receive higher scores on tests, attend school more regularly, complete more homework, demonstrate more positive attitudes and behaviors, graduate from high school at higher rates, and are more likely to enroll in higher education than students with less involved families. For these reasons, increasing family involvement in the education of their children is an important goal for schools, particularly those serving low-income and other students at risk of failure. Increasing family involvement in children's education is also an important goal of Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA)1, which is designed to enable schools to provide opportunities for low-income and low-achieving children to acquire knowledge and skills contained in challenging standards developed for all children. Title I is the largest federal program supporting elementary and secondary education.

Cognitive Development

To accommodate their distinctive learning processes and abilities, educators need to understand cognitive development theory as it applies to children and adolescents. With understanding comes the ability to utilize its concepts in order to develop effective teaching strategies tailored to students' age and stage of development. This essay will describe the basic premises of cognitive development theory and then compare and contrast three aspects of Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotsky's cognitive development theories - the nature or development of intelligence, the stages of development from birth through adolescence, and the classroom applications of each theorist's views on cognitive development.

The Random House Unabridged Dictionary defines cognitive development as “the process of acquiring intelligence and increasingly advanced thought and problem-solving ability from infancy to adulthood.” cognitive development. (n.d.) This process can be affected by both biological and environmental factors throughout the lifetime of a person. Two theories of development have been proposed to describe how the acquisition of knowledge occurs as a child matures - either continuous or discontinuous. Continuous theories propose that development occurs in a smooth progression as children learn and experience their environment. These theories stress the influence of environmental conditions to drive cognitive development. In contrast, discontinuous theories propose “…that children progress through a set of predictable and invariant stages of development…” (Slavin 2009) regardless of the influence of the environment. These theories focus on the internal hereditary factors that drive cognitive development. Today it is acknowledged that both internal and external factors play a role in the process of cognitive development.

Two significant contributors to cognitive development theory are Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotsky. Their writings form the basis for the constructivist theory of learning and instruction. The assertion of constructivism is that cognition is the result of mental construction - students learn by interacting with the environment and integrating new information into what they already ...