Parent Teacher Education Connection: Preparing Preservice Teachers for Family Engagement

Source: The Teacher Educator, Vol. 49, No.2, p. 133–151, 2014
(Reviewed by the Portal Team)

This study aimed to assess the impact of the Parent Teacher Education Connection curriculum on the knowledge and attitudes of teacher education candidates.
The Parent Teacher Education Curriculum is a Web-based curriculum focused on instructing teachers about best practices in family involvement.

Methods
The Parent Teacher Education Curriculum was developed by four universities that were geographically dispersed and served different types of public school communities. The universities employed this curriculum over a period of three years in a variety of preservice teacher education programs.

Data were gathered from 1,658 teacher candidates who completed the module(s) of the curriculum in courses in which they were embedded.
The authors used pre- and post-assessments to examine changes in candidates knowledge about six types of parent involvement. They also used the Attitude Towards Parent Involvement Survey to assess changes in candidate attitude about parent involvement.

Discussion
The findings reveal that knowledge and attitude assessments administered before and after use of the modules showed significant improvement in knowledge and attitudes across all settings.
This study demonstrated that teacher candidates experienced significant knowledge gains from pre- to posttest after studying the Parent Teacher Education Connection Modules as they were embedded in various courses of their teacher education curricula.
This study reveals the impact of the curriculum on candidate knowledge and attitudes when it is integrated within the preservice teacher education curriculum.

The authors noted that earlier studies have not examined the use of a parent involvement curriculum on candidate learning of content. The authors mentioned that the focus of this study on parent involvement is its uniqueness.
The authors argue that more work is needed to demonstrate the potential of this constructed curriculum to expand knowledge, skills, and attitudes to promote parent and teacher partnership in a variety of American public school settings.