Effect of parental engagement on pupils’ remote learning
Group 010
April 2022
1 Rationale
Each member of this group went through the lockdown as well as the sudden transition to remote learning.
In spite of being located in different parts of the world, most of us faced similar challenges and hence, inspired
us to choose this dataset which addressed students’ learning experience in the pandemic. Having had been
through more than one school year of remote learning, we were sufficiently curious about remote learning
from a different perspective i.e. the parents’ perspective, acknowledging the fact that it was just as much a
difficult challenge for them. This particular question was chosen in order to answer how the teaching process
could be made less complicated with their help.
2 Introduction
This report is a display of the analysis of the impact of parental engagement on a student’s participation with
remote learning during the COVID-19 pandemic. All schools were shut down by March 2020 in accordance
with the British Government’s regulation concerning the COVID-19 outbreak. Several schools switched to
remote learning causing parents to be increasingly involved in the learning process. This is highlighted
in the data from the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER) which consists of two school
surveys conducted with the NFER Teacher Voice panel and publicly-funded primary and secondary schools
in England. The dataset consists of multiple variables and the focus of our investigation is on the parental
engagement determined by teacher ratings of parental commitment and pupil engagement is determined by
returned assignments. Hence, we are trying to establish a correlation between parental engagement and ease
of teaching through student participation. The research question is answered through the general analysis of
parental and pupil engagement, and the analysis is further extended by investigating the controlling variables
mentioned below:
• School Type (schtype);
• Teachers’ access to technological (TQ10) resources;
3 Data Analysis
3.1 General Analysis
In order to understand whether parental engagement and student participation are related, we investigate
these variables in order to understand the type of correlation both components have or not.
1
, Figure 1: Percentage of fully engaged parents vs. percentage of pupils returning assigned work
The scatterplot presents a positive correlation between the variables meaning schools with a higher per-
centage of parents being fully engaged tend to have a higher percentage of pupils returning assigned work.
Yet, this conclusion is flawed due to the outliers present in the data, most evidently present towards the
upper left corner. This is caused due to the specific methodology implemented in the original survey. Teach-
ers were asked to scale the percentage of parents fully engaged and therefore, there is a case of estimation
associated with this method of measuring values, which results in outliers which may skew the results. This
flaw is further explored in detail in Charles F Manski and Fransesca Molinari’s manuscript on Rounding
Probabilistic Expectations in Surveys (Manski et al., 2012).
The large dispersion of pupil engagement rate at a certain parent engagement proportion is shown in
Figure 2. Hence, we justified choosing to analyse the median over the mean.
2
Group 010
April 2022
1 Rationale
Each member of this group went through the lockdown as well as the sudden transition to remote learning.
In spite of being located in different parts of the world, most of us faced similar challenges and hence, inspired
us to choose this dataset which addressed students’ learning experience in the pandemic. Having had been
through more than one school year of remote learning, we were sufficiently curious about remote learning
from a different perspective i.e. the parents’ perspective, acknowledging the fact that it was just as much a
difficult challenge for them. This particular question was chosen in order to answer how the teaching process
could be made less complicated with their help.
2 Introduction
This report is a display of the analysis of the impact of parental engagement on a student’s participation with
remote learning during the COVID-19 pandemic. All schools were shut down by March 2020 in accordance
with the British Government’s regulation concerning the COVID-19 outbreak. Several schools switched to
remote learning causing parents to be increasingly involved in the learning process. This is highlighted
in the data from the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER) which consists of two school
surveys conducted with the NFER Teacher Voice panel and publicly-funded primary and secondary schools
in England. The dataset consists of multiple variables and the focus of our investigation is on the parental
engagement determined by teacher ratings of parental commitment and pupil engagement is determined by
returned assignments. Hence, we are trying to establish a correlation between parental engagement and ease
of teaching through student participation. The research question is answered through the general analysis of
parental and pupil engagement, and the analysis is further extended by investigating the controlling variables
mentioned below:
• School Type (schtype);
• Teachers’ access to technological (TQ10) resources;
3 Data Analysis
3.1 General Analysis
In order to understand whether parental engagement and student participation are related, we investigate
these variables in order to understand the type of correlation both components have or not.
1
, Figure 1: Percentage of fully engaged parents vs. percentage of pupils returning assigned work
The scatterplot presents a positive correlation between the variables meaning schools with a higher per-
centage of parents being fully engaged tend to have a higher percentage of pupils returning assigned work.
Yet, this conclusion is flawed due to the outliers present in the data, most evidently present towards the
upper left corner. This is caused due to the specific methodology implemented in the original survey. Teach-
ers were asked to scale the percentage of parents fully engaged and therefore, there is a case of estimation
associated with this method of measuring values, which results in outliers which may skew the results. This
flaw is further explored in detail in Charles F Manski and Fransesca Molinari’s manuscript on Rounding
Probabilistic Expectations in Surveys (Manski et al., 2012).
The large dispersion of pupil engagement rate at a certain parent engagement proportion is shown in
Figure 2. Hence, we justified choosing to analyse the median over the mean.
2
