UC Riverside

High school students with disabilities experience poor post-secondary outcomes in college, employment, and independent living as compared to their typically developing peers. Parents’ involvement in their child’s learning is a significant predictor of both academic achievement and post-secondary success for all students, including students with disabilities. However, little research has examined the motivational factors associated with parent involvement in special education. The purpose of this study is to investigate the extent to which certain factors motivate involvement for high school youth with disabilities. Parent involvement includes a broad range of activities intended to support children’s learning. This study examined two important forms of parent involvement for secondary special education students: home involvement and school involvement. The selection of factors of motivation included in this study is guided by Hoover-Dempsey and Sandler (HDS) model, which provides one of the most comprehensive and empirically tested frameworks for understanding the psychological and contextual reasons parents become involved in their children’s learning. Thus far, there are no studies to date that have tested the predictive utility of the HDS model with parents of high school youth with disabilities. Given the distinct needs of parents of children with disabilities, this study incorporated the Motivations for Parent Involvement (MPI; Hirano et al., 2018) scale, which has revised and adapted scales from the HDS model to be applicable to the unique context of parents of youth with disabilities. Using a sample of 94 parents and caregivers, regression analysis was used to investigate the relationships between role construction, child invitations, teacher invitations, skills and knowledge, and time and energy in predicting the involvement behaviors of parents of youth with disabilities in school and home. Results suggested that the HDS model was more effective in predicting parents’ participation in school compared to their involvement at home. Furthermore, the findings suggest that child invitations for involvement are particularly important in promoting parents’ involvement in the schools, whereas enhancing parenting role construction may be crucial for supporting their engagement at home. The implications of these findings, as well as their limitations and future directions, are discussed.