There is a strong consensus about family’s (parents’) influence on the academic achievement of their adolescent children (Jeynes, 2003, 2005; Steinberg, Lamborn, Dornbusch and Darling, 1992). The research studies that employ the meta-analysis technique provide us with the three most used strategies: academic socialization, which is the strategy most associated with academic achievement; school-based involvement, a little less associated with academic achievement and often called "family involvement"; and home-based involvement, which yields mixed results, that is, in some cases it seems consistently associated with academic achievement and in others the relationship is less consistent (Hill and Tyson, 2009; Jeynes, 2003, 2005).

The first of these strategies, the academic socialization, is the most effective in this vital period in which the results do not depend on the depth or quality of the relationships between families and teachers; what matters is the knowledge that parents have about how to cope with adolescent school context.

In this sense, we have designed a social and educational program, ECO-FA-SE, to improve the academic achievement of students in compulsory secondary education (CSE), covering the three key elements of the intervention: School-classroom, School-family and School-student. In its original version, the program consists of three projects (see Gambara and Vargas, 2007): Cooperative Learning during CSE (CL), Family Education during CSE (FE) and Service-Learning (SL) during CSE.

This study[1] is focused on the Family Education Project (FE) which includes two subprojects. On the one hand, an educational program aimed at collaborating with adolescent students’ families (Part I: Family and Education); and, on the other hand, a program of study habits and techniques aimed at students (Part II: Study skills with students). For the design of Part I we started from a previous research study (see Lorenzo, Godás, Priegue and Santos Rego, 2009) and the work carried out by Musitu and Cava (2001); the design of Part II was based on the programs conducted by Jiménez Ortega, Jiménez de la Calle and Alonso Obispo (1995), and Suarez Yáñez (2001).

Our first objective is to analyze the families’ behavior when they are involved in the education of their children before and after participating in the implementation of a Family Education program. Second, once the aspects that had affected the program were registered, our purpose is to find out what sort of relationship these aspects have with the rest of the components of family involvement. This analysis will be carried out both under the condition of "before" and "after" the program implementation.

Third, and given that families were selected from seven different schools, we need to know whether the variables and situations in which the program is proven to be effective follow the same pattern in each school. If not, we should explain for each of them the specific circumstances regarding the development of the program implementation. Finally, we will present the results obtained with the students when considering the same variables in order to compare both types of information (this takes on special importance, since the two perspectives are rarely included in the same study).

[1] This work is supported by a research project financed through a competitive call by Xunta de Galicia “Design and Evaluation of a program for improvement of immigrant students’ academic achievement” (10SEC214042PR).

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