Parental Help with Goals Gets the Grades

In a new meta-analysis on parental involvement, researchers found the highest positive effect on student achievement among middle schoolers whose parents engaged them in goal setting that valued education as integral to future successes.

Though middle school is often marked by declining interest in academics in favor of social pursuits, it's also the time when adolescents begin to internalize personal goals. Parental guidance on goal setting and learning or studying strategies tied to achieving those goals goes a long way for students at this age. 

Parental involvement with homework had less of a clear connection to academic gains--some students found parents helpful, while others found their parents' help confusing or over-bearing.  

Chapter 9 of the new ASCD book, Changing the Way You Teach, Improving the Way Students Learn (Martin-Kniep, Picone-Zocchia) gets into goal setting and planning as part of growing strategic learners. Here's an excerpt:

Goal setting requires that students review the choices for learning, make decisions about what is important to learn or accomplish, and set clear goals to pursue them. Many adults and students needs support in terms of being able to formulate goals that are specific, relevant, and appropriate to our needs; attainable; results oriented; and measurable or at least observable. When we first ask students to articulate learning goals, their initial goal statements are fuzzy, too general (e.g., "I want to get better in math"; "I want to get do well in writing"), or without any reference to expected results or benefits.

One of the best ways to help students improve their goal-setting capabilities is to embed the articulation, assessment, and rearticulation of goals into the curriculum, providing students with ongoing and explicit opportunities to link their goals to their learning in school. Through explicit instruction in the articulation of goals, either by identifying the characteristics of appropriate goals or by comparing goals with different degrees of ambiguity and specificity, students can quickly become goal-directed individuals. Here’s a sequence of goals, goal assessments, revised goals, and revised assessment from a 3rd grader who had several minilessons on goal setting:

November: My goal is to read 20–30 minutes every other day.

January: I met my goal by reading some days I missed some but I still read.

January: My revised goal is to read at least 2 books a week. They will not be picture books they will be chapter books at my level of reading. I will keep track of how many books I read by counting all the books I read a week.

February: I met my goal of reading two chapter books. I had trouble understanding parts of the book and I got bored with one of them but I still finished it.

February: My new goal is to understand chapter books. I will read 2 new chapter books and will keep track of the parts where I get stuck. I will use the dictionary and re-read the sentences that are before the parts that are confusing to help me understand.

Notice that the February goal relates to improved understanding and not just to reading more books. The student in this example was able to identify specific strategies to improve her comprehension, but this is an area where some students need a lot of help. Questions and statement such as the following can help teachers determine what students know about learning strategies and how they use them:

• "How do you personally figure out new words?"
• "Some of the clues I use are . . . ."
• "I sound out the word by . . . ."
• "The best method for learning new vocabulary is . . . . Why?"
• "The method that is not working is . . . . Why?"