Parental support and its effect on the development of learning strategies in secondary school: an exploratory study

Abstract

This paper focuses on examine the impact that parental support has about the learning strategies in their children. To this end, it was applied the Learning Strategies Questionnaire (CEA) to a total of 80 students of 1st and 4th grade of Secondary School, from three centers –privates and publics– located in Lugo. Forty of them received parental support regularly in their academic tasks. The rest of them didn`t have any help of this type. For the statistical analysis we used the SPSS 15.0 program. Our results indicate that the students –in general– show an adequate level in the use of learning strategies, without registering significative differences according to the parental support. However, there have been found differences on the organization (p.010) and regulation (p.050) subscales, obtaining the students that have the help of their parents on the realization of the academic tasks higher scores than those who don`t have it. Likewise, there were found differences on the metacognition scale (p.050). Specifically, in the case of the students –males– of the 1st grade, where the students that had parental support marked significantly higher than their homologous in that scale. Moreover, there were found differences according to the gender among those students that received parental support, showing males better emotional control than females (p.050).

Keywords

• estrategias de aprendizaje
• educación secundaria y apoyo parental