Date of Award

January 2021

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Educational Foundations & Research

First Advisor

Robert H. Stupnisky

Second Advisor

Virginia Clinton-Lisell

Abstract

It has been established in prior research that parent involvement and school-family partnerships have the potential to positively impact student achievement; however, creating and maintaining positive and productive parent-teacher communication can be difficult. Since teachers function as the link between school and the home, there is an increased need to study the perspectives and experiences of teachers. The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between teacher perceptions of parent-teacher relationships, teacher conversation competence, and teacher communication frequency with parents.

This study involved an online survey distributed to 234 participants via Amazon Mechanical Turk. The following results were found to be significant: teacher relationship beliefs and the presence of a teacher contact mandate had a negative correlation with communication frequency, and teacher conversation competence had a positive correlation with communication frequency. In regression analysis, relationship beliefs and contact mandate were suggested to be significant negative predictors of communication frequency, whereas conversation competence was a significant positive predictor. SEM analysis suggested that only conversation competence was a significant predictor of communication frequency, which raises questions about the potential for mediation.

The major limitation of this study was the lack of convergent validity, which could have arisen due to issues with individual measures and exacerbated by a heterogeneous and potentially uncommitted online sample pool. Potential implications of this study include providing information to inform current teaching practice and improving teacher education and professional development. If teachers feel more prepared entering into parent-teacher dialogue, student achievement could be improved.

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