Student-perceived teacher and parent homework involvement: Exploring latent profiles and links to homework behavior and achievement

Abstract

This study investigated student-perceived teacher and parent homework involvement through a person-centered approach involving 739 8th graders. Latent profile analysis (LPA) identified three profiles: Low Perceived Autonomy Support, Homework Quality, and Feedback Quality (8.12 %), Moderate Perceived Involvement (63.60 %), and High Perceived Autonomy Support, Homework Quality, and Feedback Quality (28.28 %). Gender was related to profile membership. Profile membership predicted homework behavior and performance after controlling for prior achievement and parent education (d = 0.50 to 1.34). Students with higher perceived autonomy support, and quality of homework and feedback exerted more effort, procrastinated less, completed more homework, and achieved higher. Implications for teacher and parent homework involvement are discussed. Educational relevance statementOur study expands and extends extant literature, by employing a person-centered perspective to simultaneously examine the concurrent influences of various dimensions of parent and teacher homework involvement on homework behavior and performance. While complementing previous findings from studies taking variable-centered and person-centered approaches to either teacher homework involvement or parent homework involvement, our study provides more robust evidence regarding the significant role of perceived teacher autonomy support, parent autonomy support, homework quality, and feedback quality in promoting favorable homework behavior and performance. It further suggests that feedback quantity, help quantity, and content support could produce favorable homework behavior and higher achievement when autonomy support, homework quality, and feedback quality are also perceived as higher. Taken together, simultaneously considering multiple dimensions of teacher and parent homework involvement contributes to a deeper, more holistic understanding of teacher and parent homework involvement, going beyond prior work, for instance, whether homework behavior or performance is positively related to feedback quality or unrelated parent help quantity for the entire sample.