Parental Involvement in Young Children’s Education in Malaysia: A Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

This article reviews the literature on parental involvement and children’s education, focusing on the primary school level in Malaysia. This systematic literature review (henceforth SLR) includes searching, screening, appraising and synthesising of articles on parental involvement published in the last ten years (2012- 2021) from a number of electronic databases, namely SCOPUS, Taylor & Francis, ERIC, Google Scholar, MyCite, and ResearchGate. The findings of this review identify 24 relevant articles and reveal that most of the relevant research was conducted quantitatively with a focus on types and levels of parental involvement as well as particular applied parental involvement models. Besides that, the researchers utilise multiple conceptualisations of parental involvement including home-based and school-based. This study suggests that more qualitative research is needed to fully comprehend the many forms of parental involvement used by parents. It may also be beneficial for researchers to use the Malaysian Ministry of Education’s Parents/Caregivers Toolkit as a framework or instrument to investigate parental involvement to gain more relevant findings.