Parental Involvement and School Performance: Comparison of Fifth and Sixth Graders in two primary Schools at Glo-djigbé in Benin

Abstract

Parent involvement is theoretically known to contribute to children’s educational success; consequently, the lack of or poor parent involvement may potentially cause school failure. The current research aims at testing this proposition by comparing two primary schools that serve the same area of Glo-Djigbé in Abomey-Calavi municipality: Ste Marcelline Catholic school, where parent involvement is part of the school culture, and Glo-Djigbé/A public primary, consonant with poor parent involvement. A mixed methodological approach consisted of the use of a questionnaire, semi-directed interview, and direct observation, enabling the comparison of the practices of occurring parent involvement and the school performance of fifth and sixth graders in both schools; altogether, a sample of 124 different stakeholders took part in the research. As a result, the school with higher parent involvement (95%) got total success for all their candidates in the CEP national exam, constantly in five successive years, whereas the second school with poor parent involvement tried to obtain 73% of its candidates to pass within the same period. Though the positive effect of parent involvement is manifest, the resilience effect is certainly at work for those students who hardly benefitted from any parent involvement.