Parental involvement in the schools with Hungarian teaching language in Transylvania
Imre Tódor
Abstract
Hill and Tyson (2009) delineate three dimensions of parental involvement – school-based parental involvement, home-based parental involvement and academic socialization –, and they analyzed their interrelated effects. The aim of volunteering in the schools is for parents to be active participants in the school community, supporting teachers and school staff and contributing to the improvement of school operations and the enhancement of their children's school performance. This research was conducted under the Research Programme for Public Education Development of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and is part of a study carried out by the MTA-DE-Parent-Teacher Cooperation Research Group at the University of Debrecen. The research aims to support the relationship between teachers and parents. Data collection took place in three countries (Hungary, Romania: Transylvania, Ukraine: Transcarpathia) and involved 1,000 parents of whom 253 were from Transylvania. The results for Transylvania indicate that 20 percent of the parents volunteered in their children's school. The results of the study confirm the findings of international literature, indicating a correlation between parental involvement/volunteering at the school level and the parents' socioeconomic status (SES), as well as the type of school.
Keywords: parental involvement in education, parental volunteering in the school, socioeconomic status (SES), Transylvania, school types