Parent Characteristics Influencing Their Involvement In Pre-School Children’s Educational Activities In Sikalame Zone, Siaya County, Kenya

ABSTRACT

Parental involvement in pre-school education still remains a question when it comes to promoting pre-school children‟s education amidst the diverse family backgrounds in the current generation. Parents have shown mild and inconsistent involvement in their children‟s educational activities leading to poor academic achievement. Sikalame zone which is the location of this study has been facing challenges of low community and parental involvement which has contributed to the neglect of early childhood development centers. The study therefore aimed at finding out the extent of parental involvement in pre-school activities and identifying factors that influence parental involvement in pre-school activities. The study was guided by Joyce Epstein theory of parental involvement. Descriptive research design was adopted for this study. The study had a target population of 42 preschool teachers and 450 parents with preschool children in Sikalame zone. All the teachers of the selected pre-schools were involved in the study. A simple random sampling was carried out to select 90 parents who were included in the sample, resulting to a total sample size of 126 respondents. Questionnaires for both teachers and parents were used to collect data. Validity was tested using content validity while reliability was tested using pearson product moment correlation coefficiency which was 0.782 for teacher questionnaire and 0.788 for parent questionnaire. Collected data was analyzed both qualitatively and quantitatively. The analyzed data were presented using bar-graphs, tables and pie charts. Findings revealed that majority of parents did not get involved in their children academic activities and rarely assisted their children with homework implying that parents were not fully engaged in their children‟s education. The chi-square test results showed that the level of involvement in the children‟s education had significant association with parent‟s gender, level of education and socioeconomic status. The test did not find significant relationship between parents‟ marital status and involvement in preschool activities. The study concluded that there was low parental involvement in Sikalame zone. The study recommended that there is need for the preschool administrators to provide some form of training to parents, so that their involvement will have a meaningful impact on the children‟s development. In addition, the study recommended a large scale survey on determinants of parental involvement in preschool activities to generate more generalizable statistics.