Parental involvement, homework, and TV time: Direct and indirect effects on high school achievement.

Abstract

The current concern over the state of American education highlights the need to understand the important influences on school learning, especially those influences that are potentially manipulable. Parental involvement in students' academic and social lives, time spent doing homework, and leisure TV viewing are three variables generally considered to influence academic achievement, variables that may also be interrelated. In the present study, the direct and indirect effects of TV time, homework, and parental involvement on high school seniors' achievement were investigated by using the massive High School and Beyond data set. As expected, homework had an important, positive effect on student achievement, and TV time had a smaller, negative effect. Parental involvement had no direct effect on seniors' achievement scores but did positively influence the amount of time that seniors spent on homework. Further analysis suggested the possibilities of low homework demands and of excessive weekday TV viewing. Given the time spent on TV and homework and their influence on achievement, we suggest that these variables be considered in the current push for educational improvement. There is much concern over the current state of American education. This latest round of interest in public schooling, although building for years, seems to have crystallized in the 1983 report of the National Commission on Excellence in Education. The commission's findings, although probably not surprising to those familiar with education, have perhaps never been spelled out so clearly for the general public. According to the report, about 13% of all 17-ycarolds in the United States today can be considered functionally illiterate; the average achievement on most standardized tests is now lower than 29 years ago, when Sputnik was launched; Scholastic Aptitude Test scores declined steadily from 1963 to 1980 (National Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983). Further, recent studies have suggested that American students' achievement is far surpassed by that of their foreign (especially Japanese) counterparts in mathematics and science (Stevenson, 1983; Walberg, 1984). It seems that learning, at least as measured by academic achievement, has suffered in American schools, a situation that seems more alarming considering that education may be America's largest enterprise (Walberg). Thus, the title of the commission's report—A Nation at Risk— seems quite appropriate. Despite current interest, such concerns with the products of schooling are neither new (cf. Silberman, 1970) nor confined to U.S. schools (cf. Marks, Cox, & Pomian-Srzednicki, 1983). Fortunately, the influences on school learning are becoming better understood (cf. Walberg, 1984), and many such