Parental involvement in the education of children with additional support needs during the pandemic: views from Croatia, Serbia, and Slovenia

Zrinka Ristić Dedić, PhD has written in co-authorship with Olja Jovanović, PhD (University of Belgrade) and Mojca Poredoš, PhD (University of Ljubljana) the scientific paper titled “Parental involvement in the education of children with additional support needs during the pandemic: views from Croatia, Serbia, and Slovenia“. The paper is published in the European Journal of Psychology of Education, which is indexed in Q1 in the Scopus database for Developmental and Educational Psychology, and Education (2023).

Abstract: Parental involvement in children’s education is one of the main components of inclusive education and one of the crucial factors in achieving positive academic outcomes for children with additional support needs (ASN). This study aims to explore the experiences of parental involvement during the pandemic and to gain insights into the personal, familial, and contextual factors (level 1 factors in Hoover-Dempsey and Sandler’s model [1995, 1997, 2005]) that influence their involvement practices. The study was conducted in Croatia, Serbia, and Slovenia—three culturally and educationally similar contexts that applied slightly different educational measures during the pandemic. Semi-structured interviews with 42 parents of children with ASN attending the lower secondary educational cycle during the COVID-19 pandemic were conducted in the spring of 2022. Three themes were defined across all three country contexts, describing parental involvement as a reaction to the emergency situation, as a parental duty, and as a response to the child’s or school’s invitation. The results confirm the importance of parents’ motivational beliefs, parents’ perceptions of invitations for involvement by others, and parents’ perceptions of life context in parents’ decisions about involvement during the pandemic. The results also highlight that parental involvement in the education of children with ASN is highly dependent on the availability of school and system-level support.

The paper is available at the link.