IRB-Institutional Review Board

Continuation Order: IRB-Institutional Review Board

General Description Of The Proposed Research

The present study contriburtes to the parents awareness regarding the behavior of adolescents in single parent homes living in poverty. This study adds to the home reading concept and specially to the children involved in the study of the grade 4, 8, 11.

The results of this study can help educators to understand the vital importance of parental support at home in helping them in the development of early reading experiences among students. Perhaps the most widely recognized theory that helps to explain differences in the level of parent involvement is in Bourdieu's (2004) theory of cultural capital.

There is a growing body of empirical research related to parent involvement that is linked to the theories discussed in the preceding paragraphs. That research is referred to as a growing body of literature because most school effectiveness studies focus on the relationship between school-level factors and student achievement rather than on the relationship between school-level factors and parent involvement. Studies of school-level influences on parent involvement report a variety of factors that are best grouped under three headings: staff characteristics, student characteristics, and school characteristics.

It is clear that parents need to be involved in student achievement and success. However, it is still unclear as to the best way to facilitate this concept, or for that matter, to come to a consensus on a universal definition of parental involvement. Policy makers appear to agree that it is more feasible and less challenging to hold the schools accountable, since it is thought that accountability can be processed and shown through student test scores and mandated curriculum. Furthermore, in high poverty areas, schools must develop compacts in which schools and parents agree on mutual responsibility of educating children in order to receive Title I funding. This concept of accountability tied to funding reaches back several decades. However, with NCLB, accountability once again appears to be swinging back to the schools as high stakes testing becomes the norm as a measure for student achievement. Certainly, within NCLB, there is clear wording that the responsibility of accountability lies with schools to implement, initiate and facilitate parental interaction and involvement. However, the major dilemma not only in research, but also in policy, still is the inability to define exactly what parent involvement is and how it is to be measured. This research was no different in that, although the researcher defined parent involvement at the onset of the endeavor, and attempted through the survey to cover all concepts of that definition, it became apparent that not only do researchers and policy makers have trouble agreeing on what parental involvement is, but so do parents and the students themselves. This certainly was not considered as a potential problem at the onset of the research, and only became apparent when the statistical analysis process began at the end of the study.

Data collection tools

The data collection tools are structured interview, that provides a richer source of data for ...