Barriers preventing parental involvement in mainstream education of children with specific learning disabilities: parent perspectives

Abstract

This study aims to investigate the barriers to parental involvement in Jordanian mainstream schools from the parents’ perspective. A 36-item questionnaire that addressed five domains was designed specifically for this study and distributed to 206 parents of children with specific learning disabilities. The results reveal that the main barrier to parental involvement relates to parents’ beliefs, followed by barriers related to mainstream schools’ teachers and team work, while ‘available facilities’ was viewed as the least significant barrier. The results indicate that there were statistically significant differences regarding parental income level for each of the five domains and the overall scale, but there were no differences attributable to parents’ educational levels and gender. Based on these findings, a number of suggestions and recommendations are made.