t adolescents prefer to spend their summer time away from parent contact. These factors are believed to have the ability to perhaps skew the results. The grades are available at the end of the year and the parent involvement will also be easily measured. An attempted 15,000 parents will be surveyed, Initially at the end of their child's eighth school year, the Second follow-up at the end of their child's tenth school year and the Third follow-up at the end of their child's twelfth school year. The survey will be mailed to the children's' parents/guardians and only one parent/guardian, the one who spends the most time with the child, is needed to fill out the survey. Once again, waiting for the end of the school year is to hopefully get information that is most recently applicable. An incentive will be used as a motivator for both parent and child will be in the form of a $20.00 gift certificate for each questionnaire returned for each individual (nice budget huh?) to a local department store (i.e. Target). Researchers Grolnick and Slowiaczek (1994), discovered that parents' school-related rather than home-based involvement is more highly predictive of educational achievement. They measured three dimensions of parent involvement that can also be used for this study: (1) parent behavior (parent and teacher-reported participation in school activities), (2) personal involvement (student-reported parent involvement--similar to home-based involvement), and (3) intellectual/cognitive involvement (student-reported educational activities with parents--similar to home-based involvement). Of the three dimensions, personal involvement had the weakest effects on academic achievement; parent behavior had the strongest effects. This study will also be using a similar scale developed by Trusty et al. (1997) through factor analysis of several items that reflect students' perceptions of their parents' personal involvement in their e...
