Parents Help Educate their Children Through Instructional Television

Abstract

AS EVERY educator knows, conditions in today's ! rapidly changing world make it imperative that children learn more than they have in the past dur ing their primary and secondary school experience. One conceivable way to increase learning is to in volve parents directly in the educational process that is, to let them take part in the actual instruc tion of their children. Such a procedure could mean more effective use of the child's home study time. A question immediately arises, however. Would such parent aid actually help the child, or would it, on the other hand, interfere with classroom teach ing methodology? Not many years have passed since the consensus of educators was that direct par e nt participation in instruction should be strictly avoid ed. And many evidently still feel this way0 As late as 1959, Frieda Van Atta, arguing that parents can help, stated the basis for the opposition point of view : The average person, regardless of how much formal education he himself may have had, just isn't equipped to help his child with school work as his teacher would help him? For this reason many educators believe that parents should not attempt to help their children with homework... a child can become confused if a subject is not explained clearly or if a problem in arithmetic is worked by a method different from that used in school (7: p. 7). Such statements are widespread in the literature. For example: It is easy to feel that education is exclusively our (the teacher's) job. We are trained to under stand children in our democratic society;we have the know-how of child guidance. Why should parents interfere (5: p0 164)? There are some people, both teachers and parents, who believe that teaching is a technical ! process that only teachers are prepared to u s e (4: p. 22)0 Though that attitude seems to softening all of the writers quoted above were urging the use of par ents little evidence exists on the actual effects of direct parent participation in education. This parental role has been investigated in the Denver-Stanford Project on the Context of Instruc tional Television, a joint effort of the Denver Public Schools and the Institute for Communication Re search at Stanford University. The Project is con cerned with teaching Spanish to fifth and sixth grade children, and it uses open circuit television as the primary instructional medium. Pupils see 15-min ute lessons in school as part of their regular curric ulum, and various ways of improving the instruction through classroom and home activities are investi gated. In the planning stages of the project a unique op portunity for parent participation was rec o g n i z ed. With open circuit television, the Spanish lessons could be seen in the home as well as in the school. And, if the lessons were telecast again after school hours, parents and children could view them and study the new language together. Considerable doubts were expressed about the value of such a program. Not only are parents un trained in teaching methods, but in this case they would be dealing with a subject totally new to almost all of them. The Foreign Language in the Elem e n tary Schools (FLES) program has established the ex treme importance of proper pronunciation and the avoidance of translation for the beginning language student (1, 3, 6)0 Would not parents both pronounce poorly and be prone to translate ? Though this was a distinct possibility, the poten tial importance to education of a finding that parents could help, and the lack of prior data in the area,