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Swedish parents’ perspectives on home-school communication and
year-one pupils learning of mathematics
Jöran Petersson1,2, Eva Rosenqvist1, Judy Sayers1,3 and Paul Andrews1
1Stockholm University, Sweden; eva.rosenqvist@mnd.su.se; paul.andrews@mnd.su.se 2Malmö University, Sweden; joran.petersson@mau.se
3Leeds University, England; J.M.Sayers@leeds.ac.uk
In this paper we explore parents’ perspectives on home-school communication with respect to year-one pupils’ learning of early numeracy. Constant comparison analyses of semi-structured interviews identified three forms of communication. The first, a weekly information letter, was appreciated and typically functioned as a starter for conversations with children about their learning of early numeracy. The second, the development talk, was appreciated as an indicator of a child’s progress, but proved controversial in the presentation of mixed messages to parents and limited with respect to helping parents support future mathematical learning. The third, parent-initiated contact, was discussed in ways that masked parents’ reasons for making contact and prevented, therefore, any insights into their contribution to mathematical learning. Some implications are discussed.
Keywords: Home-school communication, parent perspectives, numeracy, year-one, Sweden.
Introduction
It is widely accepted that a secure understanding of early numeracy (Desoete, Stock, Schepens, Baeyens, & Roeyers, 2009) and appropriate parental involvement influence greatly children’s mathematics learning (Skwarchuk, Sowinski, LeFevre, 2014). However, for parents to know how best to support their young children’s learning of early numeracy, it is important to understand the forms of communication that exist between schools and parents, particularly in the context of a country like Sweden, where schools are obligated to “work together with and continuously inform parents about the pupil’s school situation…” including knowledge acquisition (Skolverket, 2019, p. 14). Based on this, the research reported in this paper focused on addressing the question:
What are Swedish parents’ perspectives on home-school communication and their year-one children’s learning of numeracy?
What is known about home-school communication w.r.t. the learning of early numeracy Various scholars have examined parental involvement and found a strong positive correlation between their involvement and their child’s achievement, “regardless of the definition of parental involvement” (Wilder, 2014, p. 392) . Also, attempts to categorise parental involvement typically conclude that home-school communication is one of the most important forms (Thompson & Mazer, 2012). Home-school communication takes different forms, each offering different perspectives on, for example, the freedom of parents to take initiative and seek resolutions to their concerns. Also, home-school communication can be either synchronous, whereby participants are simultaneously engaged, or asynchronous, whereby participants engage at different times. For example, a parent-teacher conference or a telephone conversation are synchronous, while email or a weekly newsletter are asynchronous. When parents contact schools, they typically prefer asynchronous communications
like email when addressing academic matters but synchronous communications like face-to-face meetings or telephone when addressing matters of social well-being (Thompson & Mazer, 2012). However, research internationally tends to suggest that communication is generally structured by schools in ways designed to “keep parents in their place” (Karlsen Bæck, 2010, p334; Saltmarsh & McPherson, 2019).
A well-known mode of synchronous communication, found in many educational systems of the world, is the parent-teacher conference. Often, as in England (MacLure & Walker, 2000), these conferences are teacher-led, with the passive presence of children arbitrarily permitted. For parents, they “tend to be ritualized occasions”, with teachers controlling the conversation in ways that allow them to impart information, smooth over problems and prevent parent input until the meeting’s end (Minke & Anderson, 2003, p.50). In the context of Sweden, the aim of the conference is to “inform the parents on the status of their children’s schooling… discuss their social and psychological adaptation… (and) areas of improvements which the child needs to work on” (Osman & Månsson, 2015, p. 44). In this respect, the Swedish educational system differs from many others in that the child is present, and, is frequently expected to lead the conversation (Pihlgren, 2013). Research has shown that children typically take between one and two weeks of school time to prepare the presentations they need for the meeting (Pihlgren, 2013). Moreover, to the detriment of other matters, students typically focus on assessment and, depending on individual circumstances, have mixed feelings about the process (Lindh-Munther & Lindh, 2005). All that being said, while positive parental perspectives on home-school communication are related to the provision of numeracy-enriching home environments for kindergarten children (Lin, Litkowski, Schmerold, Elicker, Schmitt & Purpura, 2019), little is known about the same relationship for year-one children.
Methods
In this paper, by means of data derived from semi-structured interviews, we examine how parents of year-one children construe the relationship between home-school communication with respect to their children’s learning of numeracy. The principals of three schools, which we have labelled City, Suburban and Satellite, due to their locations in the centre, suburbs and satellites of the same large city, were contacted about the project. These three schools were approached primarily due to variation in the population demographic profiles. With the principals’ permission, parents and carers of year-one children were invited to participate, leading to year-one, fifteen and nine interviews in Satellite, Suburban and City Schools respectively. With the support of the schools’ principals and to facilitate the process, 22 interviews were undertaken in private rooms at children’s schools during the same weeks as children’s development talks (utvecklingssamtal), while three were held in parent’s workplaces. Parents, informed of their rights, gave written consent to participate. Interviews, lasting between 20 and 30 minutes, were recorded for later transcription. The interviews were structured by a series of broad questions focused on how parents construe their roles in relation to their children’s learning of mathematics in general and basic numeracy in particular. For this paper, we focus on the parents’ response to questions about home-school communication with respect to learning early numeracy, with follow-up questions, when needed, inviting elaboration, particularly with respect to eliciting details about mathematics.
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Acknowledging the exploratory nature of the project, data were subjected to the constant comparison analytical process of the grounded theory, whereby a random script was read and utterances related to home-school communication identified and coded. A second script was then read with the aim of identifying both new codes, in which case the first script was reread, to see if the new codes had been missed on the first reading. The process was repeated until no new codes emerged, after which all codes were placed in the three broad themes presented in the results. In conventional grounded theory research, new data are sought only when needed. Here, we instead were constrained by the availability of parents at children’s development talks. Consequently, we had to decide, at the start of the study, how many interviews should be undertaken. Earlier studies with similar idiographic aims have indicated that fifteen interviews should be sufficient to achieve thematic saturation (Robinson, 2014), a total confirmed sufficient for thematic saturation by our own teacher interviews (Sayers, Marschall, Petersson & Andrews, 2019). Thus, acknowledging that with a less homogeneous group than would be the case with teachers, we aimed for a minimum of 20 and achieved 25. Importantly, to minimise the loss of contextual meaning, transcripts were analysed by Swedish members of the project team before quotes were translated into English for inclusion in this paper. With one exception, all informants had academic backgrounds. We conjecture that these well-educated parents, with generally high levels of economic capital, social capital and cultural capital, are more likely to have the confidence to volunteer for interview than less well-educated or minority parents (Vincent, 2017). In the following, we remain mindful of this possibility.
Results
All parents, to preserve anonymity and make for ease of reporting, were given pseudonyms defined by their child’s school and a unique reference number. Thus, the one parent from Satellite School was designated Sat 1. The fifteen parents from Suburban School were designated Sub 2 through Sub 16, while the nine parents from City School were designated Cit 17 through Cit 25.
The analytical process described above yielded three broad forms of home-school communication, succinctly summarised in Sat 1’s comment that, “we get information every week, on Friday, with the weekly newsletter. Otherwise, it's the development talks that you learn more from, although you can also come here every day”. The first of these, the weekly newsletter, is an asynchronous, school-initiated, teacher-to-many and one-way form of communication with no opportunity for parents to take initiative. The second, the development talk, is a synchronous, school-initiated and two- or three-way communication with opportunities for parents to take the initiative dependent on how individual schools, teachers, parents and children construe the meeting. The third, the parent-initiated conversation, is typically an asynchronous communication with, in principle, wide opportunities for parents to take the initiative. In the following, we present the results for each of these forms of communication in turn before discussing them collectively.
Communication through weekly letters from school
It was clear from the spread of the informants’ responses that all three schools sent out weekly newsletters to parents and that, broadly speaking, parents were satisfied with their content. For some, it acted as an aid to their understanding of what was currently happening in school, particularly when, as mentioned by Sub 10, “if you don’t have a talkative child, you don’t know which numbers they
are learning presently”. Moreover, for some, the weekly letter was seen as a means of prompting conversations at home, especially when, as noted by Sub 2, children respond to the question, “what did you in school today?”, with “I don’t remember”. In such circumstances, parents can draw on the content of the newsletter to initiate conversation at home, whether at a general level or a specific mathematics. For example, with respect to the former, Cit 24 commented that “as one reads the weekly letters one gets information from which one can ask questions of your children about things that one has found out from the weekly letter”, while from the latter, Cit 2 spoke of saying to his child that “I read that you worked with this digit in school”, thus prompting a quiet child to respond. It was also clear that, while all three schools set regular reading homework, mathematics homework was a rarity. On those rare occasions, parents spoke of how it was sent directly to them, typically in the newsletter. For example, as Cit 18 recalled, the newsletter can serve multiple mathematics-related purposes, saying that it “encouraged talking about halving… It is their way of putting the information in the weekly newsletter that is special. It may well be a way to connect around the dinner table”. Another parent, Sub 13, spoke about an occasion in which he received instructions for a “homework on 10-bonds…we practised the bonds one evening.”.
However, a few parents seemed less positive about the content of the newsletter, even though their comments never referred explicitly to mathematics. Typically, they spoke of too much information for them to keep track. For example, Sub 5 spoke of its mainly including “dates and things like that”, adding that “you may miss certain things. It's an incredible amount of information”, while others, like Sub 13, felt that “it is expected that much information will be shared, which is constantly pumped from school… One needs to keep track of skating that day, and excursion with lunch bag that day, and all such basic information. It takes time to absorb such things”.
Overall, though, with respect to mathematics, most parents seemed content with the weekly newsletter, not least because the received view was that schools expected little parental involvement other than to follow the information they send and, as noted by Sub 8, support their child in developing a “positive image of school”. In this respect, Sub 13’s comment was particularly telling. He said, approvingly, that
I think that the Swedish school is principally based on everyone having the same opportunity. So, pushing things onto parents and creating expectations that parents should help goes a little against it, because all parents and homes have different conditions. So, I think I'd like to say that the expectation of parents is pretty low.
Communication in development talks
At both Suburban and City schools, development talks are child-led, while at Satellite school they are teacher-led. Moreover, at City school, these child-led talks are held in parallel, with one teacher circulating between them. However, such distinctions seemed not to influence parents’ perspectives on the communication they engendered, which varied considerably within and across schools. Interestingly, and perhaps unsurprisingly, those with most to say were typically those least satisfied and, while all parents were asked to focus on mathematics, most spoke in general terms.
For many parents the development talks were opportunities for them to learn about their children’s progress in mathematics. For example, with respect to Suburban school, Sub 14 said that “the children
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lead (the meeting) themselves … describe what they have done and how they experience what is easy and what is difficult. They are very nervous but very well-prepared”. In similar vein, Sub 4 said, of her daughter, that “we got to know what they have been working on and how she wants to develop herself and what she has for goals. And then we got to look in her maths book, because she has been working on numbers”. Similar responses emerged from the parents at City school, as with Cit 19, who said, “from my son’s point of view, he has to write what he thinks is good and what he thinks is not, what he likes or dislikes. I think it is quite clear. They don’t lie, they just show what they think. I can see exactly what he likes or dislikes at school”, while Cit 20 added that, in the particular context of City school “the kids have been preparing. They will paint in different colours how they think they can do this… Then we will set goals together”.
However, following their children’s presentations, parents’ responses varied. On the one hand, Cit 19 spoke positively, saying, “after, I can discuss with the teacher, how to improve or what the problem is, why he doesn’t like. Or why he is not good at this and how to improve”, while Sub 11 commented that although “the development talks are student-led at this school… if you have something beyond that, you can talk to the teachers themselves about the child's development”. On the other hand, Cit 20 was critical, saying, with respect to goal-setting, that “it should be done together with teachers. But it never happens, because there are so many others in that room who need the teacher. No teacher will ever come to us, so we have to set some goals ourselves that we think seem reasonable”.
A second theme, albeit less frequently expressed, concerned an apparent dissonance between different participants’ perspectives on a child’s development. For example, Cit 22 commented that “we saw the test [during the development talk] and he did correctly on most of it. But it was, kind of, his own impression that he performed poorly”. Other parents, such as Cit 18, were more explicit in their uncertainty. She commented that because her daughter “really does not like mathematics, she should choose the colour blue, which means that you are insecure and think it is difficult. But she coloured it green. Then I ask myself; to what extent can a child assess herself? At the age of seven?” Finally, this particular theme was summarised well by Sat 1, who said that
I'm a little stressed out by the development talks. And it's not just me. There are many, many parents who say the same. Almost every teacher says that he or she (the child in question) … is very capable, and everything is good and so on. But, by the end of the school, by the end of the year, I mean, you know that it is not so good…. So, it would be good if the teacher could say, 100%, how it is with children. If he is good at maths or if he is not good at reading. Communication through parent-initiated contact
Most parents spoke of the means by which they would contact teachers should the need arise. In general, these fell into three forms, catching teachers when leaving or collecting their child, emailing or telephoning. With respect to catching teachers, Cit 24 was among the most assertive, saying that “If I want to talk about something, I just grab a teacher when I am there or book a meeting”. Others were more circumspect, as seen in Sub 5’s comment that “if I need to talk to the teachers, there is an opportunity for that. I can do it, but I haven't had that need… If I had that need, I would rather send an e-mail… I think that is easier than talking at eight o’clock”. However, for many teachers, and for a variety of reasons, such an option does not exist. For example, Cit 20 observed that “when I leave
my child in the classroom, there is no chance to talk to the teacher because it is busy and noisy”, while at the end of the day, “when I pick him up… there is only the leisure staff”. This latter comment reflected those others, as in Sub 9’s experience that “they (teachers) are not here, it is only leisure staff” and Cit 18’s “when you pick them up in the afternoons, the teachers are not available”.
Most of the parents who could not see teachers at the beginning or the ends of the school day, plus many others, spoke of their use of email. For some, it was their preference, as seen in Cit 18’s comment that “I usually mail. It is usually the easiest... I feel e-mails are very good. It's fast and easy. And you can also request your own separate call”. In similar vein, reflecting the earlier issues about teacher availability, Sub 8 noted that “if there is something I would like to talk to them about, I think they (the teachers) are accessible and open, but maybe not when they stand in the doorway as you pick up and leave. But I know I could introduce it in an email, which make me feel welcome”. Others spoke of their positive experiences of having emailed teachers. In this respect, Sub 5 commented that “I emailed the class manager about something… and the class manager added that my daughter needs to practice ten mates… and I think that's great, because I didn't know that she had a problem with ten-mates”. In similar vein, Cit 20, despite her earlier reservations, added that “I emailed once and asked to have a meeting. It was about mathematics. I don't think that was a problem at all. It went great”. Finally, a few mentioned using the telephone. For example, in addition to Cit 18’s observation that she can email to request a convenient time to call, Sub 16 mentioned that he “can call or send emails”, which he does “three to four times a term”, while Sub 9 commented that parents “have access to their (teachers’) phone numbers, so we can call them if it is urgent ... Not very often, mostly when something has happened. We call at most once or twice per term approximately”.
Discussion
In this paper, our goal was to explore parents’ perspectives on the ways in which home-school communication supports their children’s learning of numeracy. Analyses of semi-structured interview data yielded three broad themes similar to those found in the literature. These concern school-initiated newsletters and development talks, and parent-initiated contacts. The weekly newsletter was broadly seen as helpful, particularly when its content informed parents about the mathematics currently being studied and prompted mathematics-related conversations in the home. It was also viewed positively when it included mathematics-related activities parents could do with their children or homework explicitly tied to number-related learning. However, for some parents, although this was never discussed in relation to mathematics, some letters were thought to include too much detail, prompting concerns that parents would ‘miss’ something important. In sum, this teacher-initiated form of communication was generally appreciated and seen to play an important role in children’s learning. In principle, all parents seemed to value the development talk, seeing it as an essential element of home-school communication. Typically, this was manifested in comments confirming the aims for the talk as summarised in Osman and Månsson (2015), particularly the need to establish learning goals, albeit rarely explicitly tied to mathematics. However, reflecting earlier research (Minke & Anderson, 2003; Osman & Månsson, 2015), some parents were made anxious by teachers portraying falsely positive (or negative) images of children’s mathematical competence. With respect to their children’s personal presentations, some parents were clearly impressed and felt they had learnt much
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about their child, while others, particularly where several development talks were held simultaneously, felt abandoned at a time when teacher-input was desired. That said, in contrast with the year-six pupils discussed by Lindh-Munther and Lindh (2005), there was little evidence that parents thought their children found the experience uncomfortable, although some parents questioned their children’s ability to evaluate accurately their learning. Overall, the school-initiated development talks were positively viewed in principle but challenged in practice, particularly as it was only in parents’ expressed concerns about the process that mathematics and numeracy were discussed. Finally, while a small number of parents felt able to ‘grab’ teachers at the beginning or end of the school day, most seemed to accept that teachers were unlikely to be available for individual consultations. In their acceptance, the majority felt they could email teachers and set their own agendas for discussion, confirming earlier research that it is easier to email than to ‘grab’ a teacher (Thompson & Mazer, 2012). Moreover, parents that had emailed teachers spoke positively of the responses they had received and of teachers’ openness. Few chose to use the telephone, although those that did spoke positively of the experience. In sum, with a single exception and despite interviewer prompts, mathematics did not feature in discussions of parent-initiated contact. This may have been a consequence of the ways in which we conducted our interviews, although there was little evidence of any justification for parent-initiated contact.
In closing, this small-scale study has shown the differential impact of three forms of parent-school communication on year-one children’s learning of mathematics. The weekly newsletter clearly has a support role, which parents generally value. The development talk, beyond reporting progress, seems to have relatively little impact on parents’ ability to support their children’s mathematical growth. It may be, we speculate, due to the possibility that children leading the conference discussions of future mathematical learning may be subordinated to the child’s perspectives. Parent-initiated contact was discussed in ways that failed to indicate its impact on mathematical growth. Importantly, research internationally tends to suggest that home-school communication is generally structured by schools in ways designed to ‘keep parents in their place’ (Karlsen Bæck, 2010; Saltmarsh & McPherson, 2019) and this may be true here with respect to the newsletters and development talks. However, this may not by the case with parent-initiated communication, although, since our sample included only well-educated parents, work may need to be done to help all parents ask the right questions when concerns over their children’s learning of mathematics arise and they need to contact the teacher. Acknowledgment
The authors acknowledge gratefully the financial support of Vetenskapsrådet, project grant 2015-1066, without which the work reported in this paper would not have been possible.
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