Since 1993 the OECD’s Centre for Educational Research and Innovation has initiated the “What Works in Innovation” project to offer policy-oriented studies in areas of emerging importance (CERI, 1997). One of those studies,Parents as Partners in Schooling, shows that governments give families and communities more power to involve in the education offered by local schools in nine OECD countries. Under the influence of Confucianism, parents usually value the academic support for their school-aged children at home in Asian countries; however, the breadth and depth of parent involvement have changed since the 1990s’ education reform (Pang et al., 2003). In Taiwan, decentralization is one of the major characteristics of the recent educational reform. The Educational Fundamental Act (1999) gives parents the rights to select the form and content of education and to participate in educational affairs of local schools and the Teachers’ Act (1995) requires one representative from the Parents’ Association to participate in the assessment and approval of teachers’ initial employment, renewed employment, and tenured employment in every school.

Parent involvement has become one of the important issues in educational research. Although the number of studies on this field increases steadily, one of the methodological limitations in these studies is that they focused on parental involvement as a whole but didn’t distinguish mother’s and father’s involvement (Flouri & Buchanan, 2004; Hsu, Zhang, Kwok, Li, & Ju, 2011). Maternal behavior is considered paramount in child development because children spend most of their time with their mothers (Veneziano, 2004). Mothers hold the majority of responsibility for daily care in infancy and early childhood (Phares, Fields, & Kamboukos, 2009). Even in middle childhood and adolescence, mothers still play the major role of parenting, including managing their children’s school affairs (Lareau, 2000; Reay, 1998). Hsu et al. found that Chinese mothers were more involved in education than fathers and mothers’ involvement had a direct effect on adolescent academic achievement. Chang (1999) found that even most of the presidents of the Parent Associations were students’ fathers in Taiwan, in fact the mothers often acted for them in school affairs. As Lareau suggested that there are two types of parent involvement: “his and hers.” The assumptions of gender neutrality behind many of the studies on parent involvement may mask such important issues as unawareness of gender inequity in parenting (Reay, 1998).   

Another limitation of previous research is that it is still unclear how individual parents’ involvement changes over time. Epstein (2001) suggested that the influence of time factors on parent involvement deserves to be explored further. The amount of longitudinal studies on mother involvement is few compared to the cross-sectional studies. Most of the longitudinal studies on mother involvement analyzed data from large sample-sized databases, e.g., the National Child Development Study (Flouri & Buchanan, 2004), the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (McBride, Dyer, Liu, & Brown, 2009), and the Taiwan Education Panel Survey (TEPS) (Hsu et al., 2011). The sample of the TEPS only included students and their parents in grades 7-12 and junior colleges. The items related to parent involvement in the TEPS questionnaires were few. Thus, how mothers’ involvement has changed when their children go through different grade levels is still unknown.

The purpose of this study was to investigate in depth the change of mothers’ involvement in their children’s education from kindergarten to grade 12. Specific research questions were as follows:

1. What is the initial status of mother involvement in grades K-12?
2. What is the change rate of mother involvement in grades K-12?
3. What is the extent of the influence of mother factors and child factors on mother involvement in grades K-12?

Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (1997). Parents as partners in schooling. Paris, France: OECD. Chang, Y.-T. (1999). Mothers’ experience of school involvement in Taipei (Master thesis). Retrieved from http://thesis.lib.nccu.edu.tw/cgi-bin/gs32/gsweb.cgi/ccd= oHwLOy/record?r1=1&h1=0 Educational Fundamental Act. (1999). Epstein, J. L. (2001). School, family, and community partnerships: Preparing educators and improving schools. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Flouri, E., & Buchanan, A. (2004). Early father’s and mother’s involvement and child later educational outcomes. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 74, 141-153. doi:10.1348/000709904773839806 Hsu, S.-Y., Zhang, D., Kwok, O.-M., Li, Y., & Ju, S. (2011). Distinguishing the influences of father’s and mother’ involvement on adolescent academic achievement: Analyses of Taiwan Educational Panel Survey data. Journal of Early Adolescence, 31, 694-713. doi:10.1177/0272431610373101 Lareau, A. (2000). Home advantage: Social class and parent intervention in elementary education (2nd ed.). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. McBride, B. A., Dyer, W. J., Liu, Y., & Brown, G. L. (2009). The differential impact of early father and mother involvement on later student achievement. Journal of Educational Psychology, 101, 498-508. doi:10.1037/a0014238 Pang, I. W., Isawa, E., Kim, A., Knipprath, H., Mel, M. A., Palmer, T. (2003). Family and community participation in education. In J. P. Keeves & R. Waranabe (Eds.), International handbook of educational research in Asia-Pacific region (pp. 1063-1077). Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic. Phares, V., Fields, S., & Kamboukos, D. (2009). Fathers’ and mothers’ involvement with their adolescents. Journal of Child and Family Studies, 18, 1-9. doi:10.1007/ s10826-008-9200-7 Raudenbush, S. W., & Bryk, A. S. (2002). Hierarchical linear models. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Reay, D. (1998). Class work: Mothers’ involvement in their children’s primary schooling. London: UCL Press. Teachers’ Act. (1995). Veneziano R. (2004). Parental Roles. In C. Ember & M. Ember (Eds.), Encyclopedia of Sex and Gender – Men and Women in the World’s Cultures: Springer Reference. Berlin, Germany: Springer-Verlag. doi:10.1007/SpringerReference_3027 2011-01-31 23:00:00 UTC