Parents' participation in school life and their assessment of the quality of the educational process

Introduction. The importance of parents' participation in school life is theoretically indisputable, but the existing empirical data on the relationship between parental involvement and various educational results are ambiguous, which actualizes more detailed studies. The question of how much the participation of parents and their satisfaction with the school are related to the factor of openness of the school to parents requires empirical study. The purpose of the study is to analyze the levels of their home and organizational involvement, as well as the relationship between the participation of parents in school life, their assessment of the quality of school education and the degree of openness of the school, based on the material of a survey of St. Petersburg parents. Methods. The study is a secondary analysis of data from surveys of parents of students of the 4th, 9th and 11th grades of St. Petersburg schools conducted as part of a comprehensive study of the quality of school education (N=4278). The data were processed in the SPSS program; methods of analyzing paired correlations and cross-tables, reducing the dimension of the feature space by factor analysis, correlation analysis in the space of generalized indices and the construction of correlation graphs, nonparametric criteria for comparing samples were used. The results of the study. The data analysis revealed strong differences between primary school and high school according to such criteria as helping children with homework (52.3% of parents help in primary school and 9.4% in high school every day), proactive communication with the class teacher (59.9% in primary school and 34.1% in high school), as well as parents' assessment of various aspects of the quality of the educational process (significantly higher in primary school). The correlation analysis showed that the organizational involvement of parents, as well as their educational level, do not have significant correlations with the quality assessment, while the level of communication does. The more intensively parents communicate with teachers, the higher they assess the quality of the educational process at school (the correlation is higher for senior classes; r=0.21). A significant influence of the openness of the school on the parents' assessments was also revealed. The higher the openness of the school, the higher the parents rate the quality of the educational process in it (for both primary and high schools, r≥0.3). Conclusion. The obtained conclusions and recommendations can be used in the development of regional and school programs of cooperation between families and schools, to assess the importance, risks and consequences of parents' participation in school life.