The importance of the characteristics of the teaching staff which have an impact on the families’ involvement in the education of their children is a topic which has constantly been the source of ideas and research from the moment that the issue was first raised (Epstein, 1990; Eccles & Harold, 1993) and continues to be so in the present times.

It has always been said, and now it has been confirmed, that the specific factors of the school and of the teaching staff are very powerful predictors of family involvement (Epstein, 2001). With regard to the teaching staff, one may single out their opinions and attitudes in two senses: on the one hand, the general opinions on their own roles as father and mother, on their self-efficacy, as well as their schemes of gender and ethnicity   and their theoretical knowledge. On the other hand, the specific opinions regarding the students in matters of self-efficacy, of the wish to help them achieve their goals, and the interpersonal relationship with them.

In the present study, we focus on the technical knowledge on the involvement of families, on their experience in the practice of family involvement, their assessment of this (general and specific) practice, and their specific ways of interacting with the families. Their influence affects not only the involvement of the families in school-related matters, but also the students’ opinions about their academic self-efficacy (Midgley, Feldlaufer & Eccles, 1989), the students’ emotional development (Rosser, Eccles & Sameroff, 2000), their positive connection with the school (Wang & Eccles, 2012, 2013) and their behavioral adjustment (Wnag, Brinkworth & Eccles, 2013).

The course we followed in this research begins with the ideas and practices of the teaching staff, which are conveyed to the families and are undertaken in their actions as they involve themselves in their children’s school-related matters with the corresponding effects on the students’ academic results (Eccles & Harold, 1993; Epstein, 2001; Wang & Eccles, 2013).

The aim of the present study is to ascertain whether the opinions, knowledge, and actions of the teaching staff regarding the family involvement strategies show a different profile when we observe the students with a high and a low academic performance, respectively. The dimensions related to the teaching staff refer to the knowledge and implementation of the family involvement strategies, to the evaluation of the practices they carried out and to the type of interaction with the families. With regard to the student body enrolled in elementary schools, we selected the status of retained or non-retained, which, according to our previous analysis, was shown to be an important mediator between the family’s involvement and academic performance (Santos, Godás & Lorenzo, 2012).

This research was carried out within the framework of the project "Family Involvement and Academic Achievement in Primary Education: A parents’ program effectiveness" (EDU2015-66781-R), funded by the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (MINECO).

We worked with a sample of 638 elementary school students, aged between 11 and 14 years (51.70% male and 48.30% female) and a sample of the body of 78 teachers, from 12 educational establishments (with a seniority of between 5 and 15 years and a total teaching experience of between 5 and 30 years), primarily (70%) with “full time/permanent teacher’s certification”, teaching the following subjects: Natural Sciences (30.4%), Religion/values (6.3%), Spanish Language and Literature (7.2%), Physical Education (2.3%), Galician Language and Literature (3.6%), Foreign Language (3.6%), Mathematics (31.2%), Artistic Education (14.4%), and Social Sciences (2.4%). With regard to the student body, we recorded, for the purpose of the present research, their status of being retained or not. The teachers were administered a questionnaire made up of Likert-type categorical (socio-demographic) questions, including the following dimensions: - Importance and effectiveness of family involvement (27 items, alpha=.852). - Knowledge and practice of family involvement (7 items, alpha=.608). - Problems related to family involvement (8 items, alpha=.714) - Interaction with the families (7 items, alpha=.667). - Total scale (49 items, alpha=.789). The questionnaires were sent to the respective educational establishments (March-April 2018) and collected entirely within one month. Once codified (IBM SPSS Statistics 24) and once their adequacy to the designed format had been checked, we proceeded to the statistic treatment of the questionnaires in accordance with the objectives of the present research.

We begin with the assumption that the quality of the family involvement, i.e. the ways in which families approach their children’s school-related issues are determined not only by their particular styles of involvement, but also by the intervention of the teaching staff, when the teachers convey to the families their own experience and attitudes towards said involvement. Given all the above, our approach consists, first of all, of ascertaining a differentiated network of influences between the retained and non-retained student body, based upon the knowledge and implementation, by the teaching staff, of different family involvement strategies and the specific kind of interaction with the families. Secondly, we strive to reduce this whole framework to a set of dimensions, which show the biggest associative potential with being retained or not.

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