Parental Involvement: Model Revision through Scale Development

In 1995 and 1997 Hoover-Dempsey and Sandler proposed a theoretical model of the parental in-volvement process. Taking a psychological per-spective, the model explained why parents be-come involved in their children’s education and how their involvement makes a difference in stu-dent outcomes. In this article we describe our efforts to operationalize Hoover-Dempsey and Sandler’s explanation and how, in turn, those ef-forts led to revisions in their theoretical model. Because investigations of the full model are on-going, in this article we discuss only revisions in the original model’s first 2 levels, which focus on psychological and contextual contributors to forms of parent involvement. We conclude with a discussion of how our work exemplifies the reciprocal relation between theory and measure-ment and suggest how other researchers might use our scales to assess links between parents’ psychological motivations for involvement and their involvement behavior. Parental involvement in children’s educa-tion has long been associated with a range of enhanced student outcomes including ac-ademic achievement and motivation for