Late nights at the kitchen table with textbooks, problem sets and hovering parents may not be as useful as some believe.
In a recently published study conducted by former Duke researchers, tutoring by parents was found to be less effective for the child than intended. Results indicated that beyond elementary school, parents are often ill-equipped to help students with their homework as the level of academic difficulty increases.
“[The study] is about identifying the types of parental involvement strategies that are most effective for middle school students and fit with the middle school context,” said Nancy Hill, associate professor of psychology at Duke and professor of education at Harvard University.
It is often only after a student performs poorly that a parent becomes involved in a child’s school work, leading to a correlation between an increase in parental help and a decrease in academic achievement, said Hill, who was the primary researcher on the study. Because parents are not physically present at the time of classroom instruction, their assistance may not parallel the techniques formally taught in class.
“Parents, for example, may have learned to solve algebraic equations differently,” Hill said. “When the parent attempts to show the teen their own way of doing it, they may undermine the student’s understanding.”
Findings also revealed that students’ emotional psychology plays an important role in the effectiveness of parental tutoring.
“We think part of the reason the study was correlational is because when kids enter adolescence, they are trying to be independent,” said Diana Tyson, who was a co-collaborator on the project and graduated in 2008 from Duke’s Department of Psychology and Neuroscience graduate program.
During the early stages of maturation, teenagers are affected by a multitude of developmental changes in social, biological and cognitive aspects. This collection of changes renders the tutoring techniques designed on an elementary school level less effective or completely irrelevant, Hill said.
Although Duke students rarely turn to their parents for help with their studies, students are often unsure of whom to ask for help with a subject, failing to take advantage of Duke’s resources, said Ben Cooke, assistant director of the Academic Skills Instructional Program. In searching for help with a course, students should seek assistance from those familiar with the subject material and the methods through which the subject is taught, he added.
Teachers and non-parent academic tutors can help build students’ confidence by “helping them to construct their own knowledge, offering hints and timely information during the thinking process,” Cooke said.
In an attempt to identify effective strategies for parental involvement with teenage children, Hill and Tyson also uncovered positive results. Although parents may not directly be able to help their children with homework, they can engage their children in “academic socialization,” or activities that emphasize how the material they learn in school relates to their personal interests, Hill said. Examples of such activities include visiting museums, browsing art galleries and attending book clubs, she noted.
Self-restraint on behalf of the parent was found to be crucial to their child’s independent learning development. Parents commonly interpret normal difficulties associated with the learning process, such as struggling with challenging problems, as red-flags for seeking out homework help.
The most helpful thing parents can do for their children, Cooke said, is to “support their students in managing the emotional part of learning... so as not to interrupt or interfere with a child’s natural learning process.”
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