Volunteering as a form parental involvement in school – Presentation of the results of systematic literature review

Zsófia Kocsis - Valéria Markos - Elek Fazekas - Gabriella Pusztai

DOI: https://doi.org/10.53585/OnkSzem.2022.4.57-87

Abstract

During the past decade, investigation of parental involvement has become the focus of educational research as studies on family commitment reported positive effects on academic performance. Although volunteering in school may be one of the basic forms of parental involvement, we have no evidence-based information on its effect, and no systematic review has even been published in the Hungarian language. In our systematic review, we collected studies focusing on parental volunteering in school. This paper reviews 29 studies published between 2004 and 2021 on the relationship between volunteer and parental involvement. The studies use diverse research methods. In the analyzed articles, parental volunteering was either an effective tool for parental involvement or it was defined as one of the results of interventions and mentoring programs. Our research is novel because only a few studies focused on the school volunteering of parents in a European context; the majority of the research we studied was conducted in the United States of America. Our research draws attention to the importance of the topic, and it can be concluded that the number of studies related to the involvement of families with a more favorable socio-cultural background in the literature is limited, and this research area is considered unexplored, especially on the secondary school level. The results lead to the conclusion that the number of initiatives to involve parents decrease as the children enter higher grades. One of the presumed reasons for this may be that as the children become independent, and the parents no longer feel the need to intensively volunteer .

Kulcsszavak: parental involvement; parental engagement, parental volunteering in school, parent volunteer program,