Investigating the role of parental involvement in enhancing academic performance of tertiary students: evidence from the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Kumasi

Abstract

Using quantitative approach, this paper investigates whether parental involvement play any role in improving students’ academic performance at the tertiary levels in the Ghanaian context utilizing primary data and a standard statistical method known as ordinary least squares regression. A total sample of 613 students from Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) was used for the analysis. With regard to the variable measurement, academic performance is measured using the students’ cumulative weighted average. Again, this paper uses three measures for parental involvement – parents visiting their wards on university campus, calling them to check up on them regularly and encouraging them to perform better in academics. The results reveal that there is a significant positive relationship between the measures of parental involvement and students’ academic performance. Specifically, parents visiting their wards regularly, encouraging them and calling to check up improve academic performance by 0.005, 0.061 and 0.046 respectively. A significant negative relationship between age and academic performance is also revealed. There is also a significant positive relationship between belonging to a group and academic performance. The implication of the findings is that parents should as a matter of importance pay attention to their role by visiting, calling and encouraging their wards while they are on university campus. Doing these has the potential to improve the academic performance of their wards as revealed in this paper.

Keywords

• Students’ academic performance
• parental involvement
• tertiary education
• Ghana
• Stephen Darwin, Universidad Alberto Hurtado, Chile
• Adult Education and Lifelong Learning