Abstract
The purpose of this qualitative study was to explore parental engagement in the home learning environment, and parents’ implicit beliefs about learning underlying such engagement. Nineteen parents of school children between 7 and 12 years old were interviewed in two different cultural contexts, Finland (N = 10) and Portugal (N = 9). The interviews were subjected to inductive and deductive content analysis. Forms of parental engagement at home were similar in both countries, divided between two main categories: engagement with their child’s holistic development and engagement with the child’s schooling process. Parental narratives about engagement were, for the most part, embedded in a growth mindset (or an incremental meaning system). The most common actualizations of engagement included considering the child’s learning contexts and emotions; encouraging effort, persistence and practice; approaching difficulties as a natural part of learning and suggesting strategies for overcoming them. Parental practices of engagement were combined with the actualization of their implicit beliefs to create parental engagement–mindset profiles. Twelve parents were classified as having a growth mindset to support the child’s holistic development profile, and the other seven were distributed amongst the three remaining profiles. The study contributes to the growing interest on the association between parental engagement and their learning-related implicit beliefs, giving clear first-person illustrations of how both occur and interact in the home learning environment. Implications for practice are discussed.
Highlights
Research conducted over the past 40 years has highlighted the centrality of parental involvement in children’s schooling and achievement (Grolnick and Slowiaczek, 1994; Epstein, 2011)
Our aim in this study was to make a qualitative contribution to the growing interest on parental engagement and growth mindset
Assessed by means of both inductive and deductive content analysis, our data comprised parental narratives about how they engaged in their children’s learning at home, and how their mindset actualized in such engagement
Summary
Research conducted over the past 40 years has highlighted the centrality of parental involvement in children’s schooling and achievement (Grolnick and Slowiaczek, 1994; Epstein, 2011). The latest tendencies in global educational goals encourage a shift of the parental role in their children’s learning and call for a different approach (OECD, 2012; Goodall, 2017). Mindset is considered a major element to be taken into account in the fight against inequitable education and the stereotyping of disadvantaged students (Dweck, 2010). It has lately been gaining ground in studies of parenting styles and parental engagement with learning in the home (e.g., Moorman and Pomerantz, 2010; Muenks et al, 2015; Schiffrin et al, 2019; Justice et al, 2020)
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