Improving Learning Outcomes:
Partnering with Families for Academic Success
Looking for ways to improve academic success through family partnerships? Check out our Improving Learning Outcomes blog posts for links to videos, worksheets, and more.
Did You Know?
Research has show that up to 74% of variations in student academic achievement are due to factors outside the school, like home or family-related influences.
Every educator wants to see every student succeed, both in their classrooms and beyond.
Since the first U.S. public schools opened their doors, countless research studies have teased apart the instructional strategies, school structures, and student services that effectively teach students’ academic skills in literacy, math, science, and more.
More recent insights reveal another critical ingredient in the recipe for students’ academic success: family engagement.
Improving learning outcomes for all students is truly a community effort. Educators are increasingly recognizing the ways caregivers support both academic learning and whole child development. When family-school partnerships flourish, everything from test scores to school climate flourishes, too.
Why whole child learning matters for student success
A whole-child approach most effectively improves learning outcomes in students of all ages.
According to the Learning Policy Institute, a whole child education “prioritizes the full scope of a child’s developmental needs to ensure that every child reaches their fullest potential.” This includes the physical, emotional, and social aspects of growing up, as well as the foundational needs that help every human thrive (food, water, safety, shelter, etc). Within this model, all students are better set up for academic success as well as other positive learning outcomes.
There are countless empirical studies examining what factors in the learning environment impact the many facets of an individual student. Let’s take a look at the commonalities found across these frameworks, using these patterns as guidelines for educators to shape learning experiences that nurture children as well as their families.
Academic Development
Naturally, academic learning is central to any whole-child approach in education. After all, to thrive as adults, children need math knowledge, literacy skills, and more.
For educators, this means providing high-quality curriculum to students within the classroom, oftentimes paired with quality assessments to track student learning progress. It also refers to tailoring instructional practices and academic interventions such that every student can successfully build these skills (as is developmentally appropriate at each age and according to each child’s needs). Structures such as Multi-Tiered Systems of Support are useful for organizing academic support around individual student needs.
The ASCD Whole Child Framework™ shows that whole child learning takes the entire education community to adopt such approaches.
That means that, alongside investing in quality curriculum and assessments, administrators also emphasize building their teaching staff’s capacity and impact through professional development. Schools also engage families and the broader community to support their whole child vision.
Social-Emotional Learning
A second component common to whole child approaches is social emotional learning (SEL). These skills range in their nature from cognitive (such as critical thinking and self-organization) to pro-social (such as perspective-taking) to emotional (such as self regulation and emotional awareness).
Research has long indicated that SEL skills better prepare students to operate as adults in the world after high school. Families are extremely well positioned to support children as young as birth and up through high school to develop these crucial life skills.
Some frameworks, such as the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative’s model on the right, highlight the importance of nurturing mental health alongside SEL. Though they are not the same, SEL and mental health are closely related. You can think of SEL skills as the tools to help students navigate and care for their mental wellbeing.
Here again, families greatly support their children with practices and self-awareness that support their own mental health.
School Climate
Yet another commonality across whole-child education frameworks is the importance of improving school climate, often referencing students’ sense of belonging as well as school safety.
A great way to nurture belonging is to uplift and celebrate the immense diversity of culture, language, and perspective that students and families bring to a school. When students see themselves in everything from the curriculum to the classroom, it reinforces the message that their unique identity belongs in the school community.
Both the Learning Policy Institute’s Framework for Whole Child Education on the right and Dr. Karen Mapp’s Dual Capacity-Building Framework for Family School Partnerships underscore the value of trust and connection between educators and families for improving learning outcomes.
Family-school partnerships play a crucial role in fostering a positive school climate. Caregivers themselves bring insights that can support student learning at home. They also hold valuable insights about their children’s needs, which guide educators to provide support for each student academically, emotionally, and socially in the classroom.
Ultimately, improving students’ learning outcomes requires a holistic approach that addresses not only academic abilities but also social-emotional development and overall wellbeing. It’s about creating an environment where every student has the opportunity to thrive.
Equity and whole child education
A whole child approach to learning has the opportunity to close student achievement gaps that stem from inequities present in the U.S. education system.
By understanding the non-academic factors that impact student learning — such as experiences of trauma, poverty, racial discrimination, language barriers, and more — educators can then sculpt learning conditions to meet each child’s unique needs AND support them to overcome such barriers to success.
And these non-school-related factors matter greatly. One research study found that variables over which schools have no control (such as home or family-related influences) can account for as much as 74% of variations found in student academic achievement (Sutton, A. & Soderstrom, I., 1999).
This is just one of the many reasons why families are crucial in schools’ efforts to close achievement gaps. From shifting focus to “accelerating learning” to striving for diverse representation among school staff, educators have many opportunities to welcome families of all backgrounds into their communities as partners in student learning.
Learn more about the intersection of equity in education and family engagement.
Family engagement: A catalyst for academic achievement and more
As explored earlier, families hold an important role in cultivating success for their children at all ages. Educators’ views about family engagement continue to shift away from seeing caregivers as witnesses on the sidelines towards parents as active members on the learning team surrounding each child.
Collaborating with families helps educators’ co-create academic supports for each student they serve. What’s essential for administrators and teachers to understand about parent engagement strategies is how to evolve them to grow alongside a child. After all, supporting a kindergartener with early literacy skills involves different strategies than helping a high schooler deepen critical thinking skills.
Take a look at just a few of the many ways that caregivers can cultivate improved learning outcomes tailored to each child’s developmental needs, from PreK through grade 12.
PreK & Kindergarten
When a child first walks into their kindergarten classroom, it is often their first experience with learning in a formal setting. To get kids kindergarten ready, preschool programs focus on building the foundational skills that underpin the rest of their academic journey.
Language & Literacy
Successful reading as an older student and adult depends on building critical skills even before preschool. Infants begin developing language capabilities almost immediately upon birth, and those skills feed into their literacy development in PreK and kindergarten.
According to the science of reading, the essential literacy skills to build in these early grades include:
- Vocabulary growth and development
- Print, book, and alphabet knowledge
- Phonics and phonological awareness
Families are a child’s first literacy teachers, even if they aren’t aware! From creating language-rich home environments (agnostic of which language is spoken) to playing games to sound out words, caregivers can nurture reading skills in their little learners during everyday home routines.
Mathematics & Science
PreK and kindergarten are also the times for children to practice early numeracy skills and cultivate critical thinking, both of which contribute to future success in math and science. Families again help nurture basic knowledge and practice with:
- Counting and understanding cardinality of numbers
- Exploring geometry and spatial sense
- Scientific reasoning and logic
- Measuring and examining data
STEAM & Play
Young minds are full of creativity! Caregivers can support their preschoolers and kindergarteners to express their unique selves and ideas by playing pretend, inventing and building things with unusual materials, and more. These at-home learning activities, such as those offered by ParentPowered, lay the foundation for future academic exploration of engineering, technological sciences, and the arts.
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Elementary School (Grades 1-5)
As children move through elementary school, academic learning maintains a rapid pace. They learn how to navigate new systems and routines, such as completing homework and following a classroom schedule. They also build on those fundamental literacy, math, and science skills they developed in preschool and kindergarten.
Caregivers typically provide more hands-on, direct support as their students grow in these grades. When school leaders and teaching staff cultivate parents’ engagement as a partnership, with mutual support provided at home and school to students, it can bring immense benefits to the entire community.
Language & Literacy
Elementary school students concentrate on becoming strong readers and begin deepening their writing skills. Literacy development in elementary school continues and expands upon many of the themes from earlier years:
- With reading, students solidify their foundational phonics and phonological skills. They also expand the diversity of books and informational texts they read, learning how to process increasingly complex information.
- Students also further grow their vocabulary knowledge, discovering more complex words and their meanings.
- Elementary school teachers also concentrate on students’ writing skills, which will be central to future success in middle and high school coursework as well as postsecondary education.
Parents and caregivers can support these literacy milestones in elementary school students right at home. The most common strategy is, of course, reading with children before bedtime. But reading isn’t the only way a caregiver can boost literacy.
In fact, literacy moments can be found everywhere — from reading the label on a cereal box for 5 minutes at meal time to pointing out letters on signs around a neighborhood to clapping out the words of a song. All of these approaches help students practice critical reading skills.
Mathematics & Science
Math skills also multiply in elementary school. Students continue to build their comfort with reading and understanding really big numbers. They also deepen their algebraic thinking skills, practice breaking down numbers into fractions, and much more. Relatedly, elementary school students continue to apply their logical thinking to experimentation, observation, and data collection.
From helping kids find parallel lines at home to fostering problem-solving through hands-on crafting projects, caregivers can make a positive difference in their children’s math and science learning during elementary school. And they don’t need to be experts in either subject to do so!
Download our family guides below to support your parents and caregivers with nurturing science and math skills in elementary school (available in English and Spanish):
Secondary School (Grades 6-12)
For many students, the transitions into middle and high school mark a major shift in their independence and academic autonomy. Students experience markedly different learning environments (often moving from one classroom to many classrooms) and teaching support (shifting from one teacher to many subject-specific teachers).
For families, these changes can feel like the beginning of the end of parental engagement in learning. As preteens and teens seek opportunities to manage their own lives — which is developmentally appropriate — families may feel that their children do not want or need their support.
In fact, the opposite is true. Research repeatedly indicates that adolescent family engagement has a lasting, positive impact on student achievement and learning outcomes. Crucially, however, the nature of parental involvement must shift to match students’ developmental milestones in secondary school. This means families move from the captain’s chair to the copilot’s seat.
Academic Socialization
As caregivers become less directly involved in students’ learning, they can adopt indirect strategies such as academic socialization. This approach honors adolescents’ growing desire for independence while also providing guidance that promotes academic success.
Here are a few examples of what academic socialization might look like for a caregiver:
- A parent communicates expectations to their teen for academic success, which research shows can positive affect students’ actual achievement.
- Families reinforce the shared value of education, offering insights into their own experiences with learning.
- Family members discuss their students’ future goals, asking questions about what inspires them and connecting their academic learning in school with these aspirations.
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College & Career Readiness
Preparing for the future can start as early as middle school, but is often the core focus in high school. Regardless of whether they want to pursue higher education, enroll in a training or certification program, or move directly into the workforce — teens benefit from families’ support as they plan for their future of choice.
Here are just a few of the many ways that families and schools together can nurture college and career readiness in high school students:
- Families engage their teens in self-reflection activities to help them identify their strengths and interests, then linking them to potential career pathways.
- School counselors host workshops for parents and caregivers to explore the college application processes and its intricacies, breaking down the jargon and systems involved.
Caregivers and teachers partner with community organizations that offer career exploration resources to help students build concrete plans for the future.
Challenges with engaging caregivers to boost learning outcomes
It’s clear that family engagement benefits students’ academic performance in school. And yet, families and schools both face challenges with tapping into the potential of these collaborative partnerships.
For caregivers, certain academic subjects may activate feelings of anxiety (like math phobia). Another barrier for families of teens is the complexity of academic content, which may go beyond what a parent themselves learned or is comfortable navigating. Some families also have negative past experiences with school. Last but by no means least, when families struggle to secure basic needs — such as housing, food, or employment — it can greatly impact their capacity to engage with student learning at all.
These feelings may affect what a parent believes they can or should do to help their child succeed academically. Understanding these barriers to family engagement is essential for educators to then break them down.
But educators too face challenges. It may feel daunting for staff to share decision-making power with families. After all, teachers are trained extensively in learning strategies, and as subject matter experts, it can be tempting to want to make all decisions for students’ growth. Plus, most educators already have many responsibilities on their plates, making time a precious resource.
Fortunately, family engagement programs like ParentPowered are here to help both families and educators meet each other where they are and support students to thrive!
Our curriculum is designed to scaffold partnership by giving caregivers weekly, bite-sized, evidence-based learning activities and parenting tips appropriate for their children’s developmental growth. Each program includes messages specifically designed to bolster core academic areas, including language and literacy, mathematics and science, and more.
Better still, these activities require no extra equipment, knowledge, or time. Instead, ParentPowered taps into existing home routines and the wealth of insights that families already have available to support their students. We also translate our content into over ten different languages and deliver activities via text message, making them as accessible as possible for as many families as possible.
By providing families with a strengths-based, research-backed program like ParentPowered, educators set the stage for successful collaboration that focuses on improving learning outcomes.
Additional ways educators can improve learning outcomes
In addition to family-school partnerships that center students, research shows that the following approaches help educators create the best conditions for improving learning outcomes:
- Inquiry-based learning: Inquiry-based learning models are designed to engage students’ curiosity in order to give them greater ownership over their learning. One research study found that this approach had a positive impact on some student learning outcomes (Özturk et al., 2022).
- Competency-based learning: Also called mastery-based or proficiency-based learning, this approach to teaching is more complex and ever-evolving. At its core, it’s about tailoring learning experiences according to students’ mastery over certain skills. While many proponents of competency-based models point to its potential to create greater equity in academic outcomes, empirical evidence of their impact on learning is mixed, largely due to variations in implementation between schools (Evans et al., 2021).
- Project-based learning: In comparison, project-based learning (PBL) is intended to engage students in real-world activities and problem-solving as a means of learning. Here again, implementations of PBL can vary widely. However, a meta-analysis of research studies on this methodology indicates the potential for improved student learning outcomes when orchestrated well (Zhang & Ma, 2013).
- Gamification: Who doesn’t love a fun game! The good news here is that gamifying learning isn’t just great for student engagement; one meta-analysis of over 24 academic studies on this approach found that gamification can increase students’ academic achievement and performance (Bai et al., 2020).
- Teacher professional learning: Ongoing growth and development for educators can make a huge difference in teaching quality. Collaborative, pedagogy-based approaches to professional learning in particular have been found to improve student learning outcomes, as well as teacher morale and sense of recognition (Gore et al., 2017).
To learn more about creative, school-based approaches to improving learning outcomes, take a look at the U.S. Department of Education’s comprehensive recommendations.
Tips for Supporting Caregivers and Students At All Ages
From birth through high school, ParentPowered cultivates students’ growth by equipping caregivers with the skills and knowledge to nurture key academic capabilities. Through simple, accessible, everyday learning moments, we empower families and students alike to thrive.
Here are a few of our favorite activities for improving learning outcomes through family-school partnerships.
PreK & K
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Elementary School
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Middle & High School
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