CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- When dads or other father figures get personally involved, kids do better in school. The finding, says a University of Illinois researcher, suggests that schools should encourage male interaction, especially with at-risk kids.

The exploratory study was detailed today at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association in New Orleans by Brent A. McBride, a professor of human and community development. When father figures talk sincerely with kids daily, reading and math scores on achievement tests are higher, he said.

His research team looked at the cognitive impact of father-figure involvement, finding that it doesn't matter if the father figure is a biological dad, an adoptive father or just the adult male of a household. There were benefits to learning, he said, resulting from father figures simply asking their children about the activities of their school day, such as what they are learning and about their social relationships.

"The measure is of how often the father or father figure talks to his kids about activities being done in school," McBride said. "We wanted to look beyond involvement such as just dropping kids off and picking them up or helping out on field trips."

"When fathers become involved in a cognitive dimension of their children's education, it can negate such barriers as limited resources in both schools and families," he said. "What is most encouraging is that if you look at the strength of the relationship to a barrier of cultural differences, father involvement has a really strong impact on learning."

The data only capture a moment in time, McBride said, so drawing a definitive, direct cause-and-effect conclusion is not yet possible. However, the findings suggest that at-risk kids likely can benefit from father-figure involvement and that more study is needed to better understand fathers' roles and how schools can capitalize on them.

The study, partially funded by the AERA, sought to better define components of father involvement that were overlooked in a 1997 report "Fathers' Involvement in Their Children's Schools."

That report was based on the National Center for Education Statistics's 1996 National Household Survey. While it linked father involvement to better grades, McBride said, fathers' roles were limited and not measured by direct questioning.

McBride's team referred to the NCES data but drew upon data from the 1997 Child Development Supplement of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. The latter's 35-year longitudinal study by the Survey Research Center of the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan has gathered data annually on a variety of family dimensions.

McBride's study considered input from teachers, administrators and fathers about school resources, math and reading scores on achievement tests, teacher-student ratios, family environments and neighborhood characteristics. The sample was 65 percent Caucasian and 35 percent African-American.

A disturbing finding, the authors noted, involved family resources as viewed by educators. Factors such as a lack of parental interest, poor management skills within families, illiteracy, poor English-language skills and cultural differences all negatively affected learning. "The relative strength of the father-figure involvement to lessen such barriers underscores the need for schools to examine the ways in which they address these problems if they hope to help children overcome such risk factors," McBride said.

Most studies of parental involvement focus on mothers, placing the role of fathers into a secondary one, he said. "We think that having father figures taking on a more active, cognitive role may have an additive benefit, and that may help knock down more barriers.

"This is a much more tangible way to become involved. Men may need to be taught about how to talk effectively with their children," he said.

UI doctoral students Sarah Jane Schoppe and Ringo Moon-Ho Ho, psychology, and Kristina Blatchford, curriculum and instruction, worked with McBride on the study.
 

---University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

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