Yield response to heat stress as affected by nitrogen availability in maize - ScienceDirect
Export JavaScript is disabled on your browser. Please enable JavaScript to use all the features on this page., November 2015, Pages 184-203Show moreHighlightsoWe explored under field conditions whether yield penalty imposed by heat stress is affected by N availability in maize.oFor the first time we proved that maize sensitivity to heat stress was increased by N fertilisation.oExposing the plants to high-temperatures during the critical period dramatically reduced harvest index.oThe negative effect was through affecting the capacity of the plant to set grains.AbstractMaize yield has to be increased in the next decades in order to satisfy world demand. This increase has to be achieved in a scenario of climate change particularly characterised by heat stress. Several agronomic and genetic strategies for increased tolerance to high temperatures will be necessary. Some results in other crops showed interactions between high temperature stress and nitrogen (N) availability. To the best of our knowledge, this interaction has not been tested in maize. Therefore, the aim of this study was to explore, under field conditions, whether the magnitude of yield penalty imposed by elevated canopy air temperature around flowering or during early grain filling is affected by N availability. In particular we aimed to (i) quantify the magnitude of yield losses by heat stress around flowering and during early grain filling, (ii) determine whether N fertilisation affects these magnitudes, and (iii) identify whether the effects are indirect (through affecting growth) or directly on the grain set and/or grain growth capacity. Four field experiments were carried out during four consecutive years in NE Spain. The treatments consisted in a factorial combination of one or two hybrids, two or three levels of N fertilisation and three temperature conditions. The temperature treatments consisted of a control (plots grown under natural temperature throughout the growing season) and two treatments in which the temperatures of the canopy were increased in the field for relatively short periods. All experiments were well watered to avoid water stress.The elevated canopy air temperature treatment only increased the maximum temperature in a relatively small magnitude (mean daily temperature was increased at the ears height by c. 1 °C each day of treatment). However, yield penalty imposed by heat stress was in general very noticeable and dramatic when the treatment included the critical period for grain number determination, around silking. The damage was much stronger in the long- than in the short-cycle hybrid. Exposing the plants to elevated canopy air temperature during the critical period reduced harvest index, from values of around 46% in unheated conditions to 20% under elevated canopy air temperature, being the reduction higher under N200 than under N0 fertilisation treatments.As far as we are aware, we showed for the first time in maize grown in field conditions, that the losses in yield in response to elevated canopy air temperature treatment were magnified by the N availability. The effect of N on emphasising the penalties seemed not to be a direct effect of this nutrient but and indirect effect through affecting growth. The effect was through affecting the capacity of the plants to set grains and to a lesser extent to allow grain we and it was independent of any (potentially additional) effects on either uncoupling anthesis and silking or on pollen amount and viability.KeywordsGrain numberGrain weightHigh temperatureNitrogen uptakeNitrogen use efficiencyZea maysCheck if you have access through your login credentials or your institution.ororRecommended articlesCiting articles (0)Fostering children's learning: an investigation of the role of teacher-parent briefings
Fostering children's learning: an investigation of the
role of teacher-parent briefings
Loizos Symeou
School of Education, University of Cambridge, email: ls244@cam.ac.uk
Paper presented at the British Educational Research Association Annual
Conference Research Student Symposium, Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, 11 September 2003
Introduction
A school culture that supports active family engagement in the school can bring about specific improvements in children's school attainment and motivation (Becker & Epstein, 1982; Henderson, 1987; Stevenson & Baker, 1987; Epstein, ; 1995; Hoover-Dempsey, Bassler, & Brissie, 1987; Grolnick & Slowiaczek, 1994; Connors & Epstein, 1995; Georgiou, 1997; Bee, 2000).
Correspondingly, strong family-school links have been cited as a prerequisite for school effectiveness (Bell, 1993; Hopkins, Ainscow, & West, 1994; O'Connor, 1994; Sammons, Hillman, & Mortimore, 1995; Townsend, 1995; Coleman, 1998).
The most frequent way families engage with schools is, apart from helping children with their homework, by keeping informed about their children's school life in order to ensure their well-being and progressing in the school system.
Epstein's six-level typology concerning the involvement of families in their children's education life (Epstein, 1995; Epstein & Dauber, 1991) proposes the development of a two-direction system of communication by the schools with a twofold aim: firstly, for the family to be informed about the school programs and their child's school attainment, and secondly, for the school to receive information about the family conditions and environment relating to the child's schooling.
International empirical evidence reveals that, even though some schools attempt to establish a variety of practices in order to facilitate this two-direction communication, in most occasions it is more likely that flow of information between school and families is mainly directed from the former to the latter.
Moreover, it appears that this communication is controlled by the former, who additionally determines its content (e.g. Crump & Eltis, 1996).
Most schools communicate with families to inform them about their programs, conditions, regulations and decisions, or about the children's academic progress and everyday attitude.
This type of communication appears to be the more prevalent of any other type of family involvement programs or practices initiated by the schools (Epstein & Dauber, 1991; Symeou, 2002).
In addition, schools communicate their concern for the family's welfare and responsibilities, and often remind or advise parents of their responsibilities to prepare their children for school, to make sure that their children do their homework, get enough sleep, eat enough breakfast, bring their books and supplies, and so forth.
At the same time, it is suggested that schools remain reluctant to share information about other aspects of schooling, like processes of teaching, learning and the curriculum, discipline issues, and homework practices, which families might regard as fundamental and most significant to their children's understanding and well being (Martin, Ranson, & Tall, 1997).
In the case of Cyprus, where this research was conducted, there is evidence that relationships between schools and families are generally restricted (Georgiou, 1996; Phtiaka, 1996; Symeou, ).
Communication practices, which seem to be the most widespread established links between families and schools, aim at providing families information about their child's school performance, the schools' function and the ways families can support the school's work (Symeou, 2002).
A distinctive establishment of state primary schools in Cyprus is the one weekly period during which parents and guardians can visit their children's teachers to be informed about their children's schooling.
Regulations require schools to assign on each teacher's weekly timetable a permanent 40-minute period called the &Parents' weekly visiting period& (Cyprus Ministry of Education and Culture, September, 2002).
During this period, parents can meet the teacher, usually in the teacher's classroom, to have a brief meeting with her/him.
Parents do not have to arrange an appointment in advance.
Time allocated for each teacher depends much on whether there are or not other parents expecting outside the class.
The present paper records the findings of a research, which explored the information exchanged between teachers and parents during the statutory space of the weekly visiting period in Cyprus, and how this exchange of information is interpreted and used by parents and teachers.
Methodology
For the accomplishment of the research aims, a multiple case study strategy was employed, conducted in six state primary schools.
The research approach was ethnographic, with the participation of seven teachers, their pupils and the pupils' parents.
Participant teachers were voluntarily selected.
Their profiles are presented in Table 1.
Profile of the research participant teachers
During random occasional visits at the schools of the participating teachers' and after parents' consent, a number of meetings between parents who were visiting these teachers during the weekly visiting period were attended and observed.
The meetings, 42 in total, were audio-recorded.
A number of 46 parents who consented to be interviewed were interviewed individually or in focus-groups.
In most cases, the interview was conducted at the families' home, whereas in some cases, it took place exactly after the briefing with their child's teacher in the school.
Both individual interviews and focus-group interviews were aiming at exploring the content and the main issues which were raised during teacher-parent meetings and the use parents made of the information they received.
Both interviews and recorded briefings were fully transcribed.
The transcripts from the two data sources were analysed separately with the use of the ATLAS.ti software package.
The analysis of the former involved a qualitative content analysis and the latter both a qualitative and a quantitative content analysis.
The qualitative analysis aimed at exploring the content of observed teacher-parent briefings and their use by participants within and between sites, whereas the quantitative analysis aimed at quantifying their content.
This paper reports only the inter-sites findings.
Findings of the Study
The presentation of the findings draws firstly, on those findings that emerged as the most noteworthy patterns, which appeared as the broader concluding findings of the study.
Secondly, the more striking differentiating patterns across the families that participated in the research are presented.
Content of Teacher-Parent Briefings
Both the content analysis of the observed teacher-parent and the interviews indicated that teacher-parent meetings concentrated on specific aspects of the children's school-life, mostly on issues of the children's achievement and behaviour/social relations.
Table 2 Issues discussed during the weekly visiting period
Issue of Discussion
Count of Words
% of total talk
Child's behaviour and social relations
Child's achievement (test results and everyday performance)
Homework and school-activities at home
Non-academic school issues
Teacher-parent collaboration
Child's overall schooling
More specifically, the two interlocutors were found to concentrate their discussion on six broad thematic categories:
the child's behaviour and social relations in school, the child's school achievement, homework and other school related home activities, teacher-parent collaboration, the child's overall schooling, and non-academic home issues.
Interestingly, the quantitative content analysis of the transcribed conversations revealed that from all issues, the one that received the most prevalent position was that of the child's academic achievement.
Table 2 breaks down how the teacher-parent conversation is distributed among the above thematic categories/types of discussion, as these have been counted in terms of words.
The findings concerning the three thematic categories that received the most attention by teachers and parents are discussed in more detailed below.
Information about the child's academic achievement
As illustrated in Table 2, approximately 43% of the discussions were dedicated on information about the child's academic achievement.
This finding was also pointed out in parents' interviews and focus groups who repeatedly indicated that the main issues during their meetings were the child's school attainment and the child's school behaviour.
&The teacher talks to us about our child's achievement at the different subject-matters and his/her behaviour& was parents' typical response.
During the informing process about 'the child's school attainment', teachers and parents concentrated in both strengths and weaknesses in a series of attainment related issues (Figure 1).
Figure 1 Content of the weekly parent visiting period: Information relating to children's school attainment
Specifically, their discussion dealt with strengths and weaknesses of the child's attainment in specific subject areas (mainly in language, maths and social sciences), in specific learning activities (like essay writing, spelling, reading) and the child's sociolinguistic skills (particularly, when and how to use the dialect and the official language in verbal and written activities).
Moreover, it concentrated on the child's adjustment to the class mode of working and learning (e.g. pace of work, stress, concentration, laziness or boredom).
The following quote refers to how Mrs Christou described and evaluated her experience with her son's first primary school teacher, who appeared to have supported her child in adjusting to the school context:
When my son went for the first time at school...he was only five and a half years old.
He was very immature and terribly slow in reading and writing.
Thankfully, he had a very good teacher who had very good knowledge of psychology and managed to help him...you cannot imagine how much she helped him!
She also helped me as well, on how I had to deal with him.
Some times before and some times after proceeding to practical suggestions to parents, teachers tended to explain the parent how they themselves deal with a specific matter that concerns the parent's child in the class.
For instance, Mr Demetriou, the father of a boy who was attending grade one and was facing reading difficulties appeared quite informed that his son teacher &has a CD program...and she [the teacher] takes my [his] son during her time-off in order to help the child read&.
Teachers, as both the observation showed and a number of parents stressed, appeared trying not to overwhelm parents with all the weaknesses a child might experience, but rather to emphasise the most significant and urge parental attention and action towards these difficulties.
Particularly when a child appeared to be facing basic difficulties, teachers, as many parents admitted, tended not to focus on secondary inadequacies.
Nonetheless, a respectable number of families appeared to sense that what the teachers emphasize during their conversations is the 'child's weaknesses' and 'school difficulties'.
When parents and children were asked to indicate the type of information they receive when parent and teachers meet, most mentioned 'attainment weaknesses'.
It is likely, that parents cultivate negative emotions and bitterness when receiving 'bad news', which overshadow the positive components of the information received.
In any case, as parents themselves claimed, many parents seemed to be aware of their child's 'attainment weakness'.
Sometimes, particularly in the case of educated parents, parents might bring the difficulty faced by their child in the discussion themselves during the weekly visiting consultation.
Mrs Euphemia referred to such an occasion:
My son was always very stressed when he needed to write an essay.
The situation with him was unbearable.
Therefore, I told his teacher that there was a problem.
His teacher's observations were similar to mine, but this was something I could tell myself, because I was experiencing this everyday and was seeing him having so much stress when the day to write an essay was approaching. (II)
Teachers tended to supplement their information regarding the child's school attainment with specific suggestions about how parents could deal with a specific matter.
Teachers followed two different approaches in suggesting to parents how to assist their child with attainment weaknesses.
The first approach was for the teacher to describe very abstractly the child's school attainment.
These teachers usually concluded with remarks like &I want him/her [the child] to try a little bit more&.
The other approach was more subject-matter specific.
Teachers employing this second approach tended to inform the parent for specific school-subjects and to refer to the child's particular strengths and difficulties in order to make specific suggestions on how the parent can help the child at home.
For instance, these teachers would provide specific suggestions on how the child should learn his/her dictation at home when the child experienced difficulty with it.
This latter type of teachers appeared to recruit various evidence sources in order to demonstrate parents their child's school attainment.
First, they tended to make constant reference to the child's written work, writing books and notebooks, as well as to their class exercises and tests.
Special attention was given to the essay-writing book called 'Think and Write' and in tests results.
Mrs Elia described such experiences with her child's teacher as follows:
&Every time I go to see my child's teacher, he shows me his record-book where he has children's grade for each separate school-subject&.
One of the participant teachers used to demonstrate parents on a flow chart their child's rank on a specific test among all the class pupils.
The figure illustrated all pupils' marks on the test with each child's initials on the respective mark.
The teacher used to show the chart and direct the parent's attention to the cut point of his/her own child's mark.
The following quotes a specific occasion when the teacher introduced this element to inform a parent about their child's test results during their conversation:
If you see her right here...if you want to see how she does in relation to, without this having to stress us...if you want to see us in relation to the rest of the class, [...] it is this here, do you see her?
She is somewhere, lets say...she is not the best in her class, ok?
She is at this level here, but she has progressed in comparison to the last test.
Information about the child's class/school behaviour
Another core issue raised during the weekly visiting meeting was that of the child's class and school behaviour.
Most teachers were found to place an emphasis on this issue, but it was usually parents who showed a particular interest in being informed as much possible about it.
This special attention placed on behaviour by the parents compared to other topics can also easily be identified by an examination of the content analysis of teacher-parent briefings (Table 2), where the portion of the parents' talk about it appeared the second highest of their total contribution to the discussion.
Teachers and parents consented that the attention of teacher-parent briefings as to the behaviour domain was the child's 'behaviour problems' and 'deviant behaviour'.
Quite typically, teachers tended to raise the issue by referring to particular 'behaviour problems', thus initiating a whole circle of discussion with the respective parent about the 'problem'.
Much less frequently, teachers tended to bring to the fore information regarding particular incidents of a child's 'positive behaviour' class and school patterns.
This was more identified in the cases of a few of the participant teachers.
More particularly (Figure 2), the two parts tended to discuss issues following the school rules (e.g. whether the child talks to others during the class session without a permission) and the child's ability in adjusting in the class and the school conditions.
A regular topic discussed relating to children's difficulty in adjusting in school and class expected behaviours was that of adjusting in the beginning of a new school year or when first entering the school.
A mother provided her personal experience of dealing with such a 'deviant behaviour', an experience found to be quite common:
&My child was crying the first day of Grade one.
We discussed it with the teacher and we came up with a solution.
Now the child feels fine&.
Figure 2 Content of the weekly parent visiting period: Information relating to children's school behaviour and character
Moreover, teachers were found to refer to the child's social relations in and out of class, like demonstrating aggressiveness towards others or experiencing long-lasting difficulties in relating with other classmates or schoolmates.
The latter was an issue raised often by parents as well, since it appeared devastating for their children's life.
Children urged their parents to act as their mediators to the teacher in order for the teacher to provide 'solutions'.
An outstanding example of such a circumstance was that of a pupil who was systematically failing to relate to her classmates and her mother took the initiative to discuss this with the teacher, since she considered that the 'problem' was too persistent.
Finally, teacher and parents tended to discuss particular school incidents illuminating aspects of children's idiosyncrasy, like how a child handled a specific school challenge.
A characteristic example of a relevant behaviour was the case of children who tended to demand particular attention from their teacher during the class session.
In most cases, these incidents were brought up by the teacher who had the opportunity to observe them in class, whilst in some cases parents initiated the discussion of the incident after being informed by their child.
Such an example was the case of the following mother who described an occasion she felt she needed to take the initiative herself to mention a particular incident about her son to the teacher who thus managed to find a solution:
My son was elected as the president of his class, but denied the position due to responsibility-fear.
Latter on, he regretted it.
We [the father and the mother] discussed it with the teacher and our child separately, and decided that he had to take the responsibility and accept the consequences of his actions.
Parents claimed that the discussion of their child's school behaviour and the teacher's observation of incidents identifying their child's character was one of their major concerns.
As they said,
...[We, as] parents are concerned about our child's behaviour in the school, not only in the class, the general behaviour, because we raise our children, not only to become literate, but to become right persons as well (Mr Mathew).
Thus when referring to a behaviour issue, parents, particularly rural and low or average educated participant parents, tended to complement the discussion with information about their child's overall and everyday character.
This type of information was what they communicated more on their own initiative than any other type of information.
It appeared that participant parents were eager to describe their child's character to the teacher.
This type of information appeared to capture a significant part of the teacher-parent initial meetings during the beginning of the school year.
Teachers tended to provoke parental information regarding the child's behaviour during their early meetings with parents, in order to learn more about their pupils.
Teachers tended to combine this information with information they requested from the last year's teacher.
Topics relevant to the child's behaviour and character appeared to be systematically raised in the flow of the discussion of other issues as well.
The most frequently observed children's characteristic being discussed during the weekly visiting period was children's shyness.
This was more identified in rural school sites, where it seemed as a common characteristic of pupils, which puzzled both parents and teachers.
Many parents in these areas, and much less in urban areas, stated that &my [their] child is very shy in the class and feels ashamed to raise his/her hand during the class session, and we [they] try to deal with it with the teacher&.
Some issues relating to the child's behaviour were prevalent during these teacher-parent contacts as well, like the child feeling stressed as regards school matters, concerns relating to the child being mature for his/her age, and the child being reserved from everyday school activities.
A matter of particular attention was the issue of a child's school stress.
Both rural and urban parents raised this issue and maintained that their children were feeling extremely stressed about their schooling.
The following quote is from the conversation of one of the teachers, with one of his pupils' mother.
Mother: I am very afraid that he will get stressed again when he goes high-school.
Teacher: He doesn't look stressed to me...
M: No, he does get stressed.
T: Does he? Well, look, if he gets stressed only a little bit, that's good.
M: Two years ago I had to take him to the doctor because of his stress [...] He had constant pains in the stomach...his stomach...his stomach.
I took him to the doctor: &He doesn't have anything, it's
he had spasms of his bowel&.
It was from his stress, we discovered then...
T: There wasn't such an incident this year, isn't it?
No, it was last year and the previous year.
His teacher then was telling my son when he was expecting the correct answer to one of his questions during a lesson &Come on, Stelios, I was not expecting that you wouldn't know this& and he was therefore stressed.
Information about homework and home school-activities
The issue that emerged as participant families' major concern regarding their relationship with their child's school and overall schooling was that of school 'homework'.
Nearly all families who participated in the study identified the 'homework' issue as their everyday 'nightmare' with regard to their child's school-life.
With one way or another, parents at their vast majority when received the opportunity to comment on their child's schooling pointed out their indignation about having to deal daily with their child's homework.
For instance, when parents were prompted during the interviews and the focus groups by an open introductory question to describe their general experience of their primary school age child, nearly all concentrated on 'homework'.
Parents stressed that children appear to have a lot of homework at home, something which teachers admitted themselves.
Correspondingly, many parents agreed that 'something has to be done' and stressed the need for the Ministry of Education and Culture to draw the lines in relation to the nature and extent of homework.
This topic was even more stressed by rural areas families, as well as low educated families.
School-life appeared to be devastated by the phenomenon of the 'homework load' and thus described 'homework' as their main constant agony as regards their child's schooling.
Additionally, in the case of some of these families, 'homework' seemed to capture their whole school concern, thus becoming synonymous with 'schooling'.
The extreme majority of these parents, and particularly mothers, appeared to being struggling between providing their family the basics for their everyday living and predominantly dealing with 'homework'.
As a rural area mother argued
All parents are very puzzled about homework.
A Grade one child needs the whole afternoon to study.
The mother who has to be next to the child for so many hours pays the price.
A recurring direct and indirect blaming for this 'homework load' among many participant parents appeared to be the overloaded
curriculum and the approaches followed by the teachers in the process of delivering it.
Mrs Georgiou articulated her perceptions, as
I am wondering about the rapid way things are being taught, which does not provide time for children to comprehend what they are taught.
The teacher is in a rush to cover the subject-matter without caring if it has been understood.
Generally, all parents are doing the teachers at home.
Similar were the views of another mother who noted that:
[...] children sometimes (not always) come home with a lot of homework and they don't know where to start from, probably because the work hasn't been explained properly in class, either because there are too many pupils or because it isn't made interesting enough.
Homework discussions were mainly concerned with the particular subject-matters areas of language and maths, as well as general approaches to homework habits.
The following figure breaks down the main types of homework themes which appeared to receive most attention by parents and teachers during their meetings.
Figure 3 Content of the weekly parent visiting period: Information relating to homework and school related home activities
Some examples that exemplify the content of the discussion that was taking place as regards homework are as follows:
concerning reading, parents for the most part requested guidance on how many times their children should do their reading.
In one particular case, a mother was feeling that she exaggerated in the number of times she was persuading her child to read the extract, since sometimes the child ended up knowing it by heart.
When she brought the issue up to the teacher, the teacher provided her specific directions in order to supervise a more balanced reading session with her child at home.
In the case of spelling, the core issue brought up was how much emphasis to be paid on spelling at home when children were filling exercises in their notebooks, composition book, exercise books and writing books.
Finally, parents tended to appeal for general assistance on issues like the quality of the child's work at home or setting a time framework for homework responsibilities.
The first issue concentrated on how much time, effort and emphasis the child should devote in order for the child to achieve a specific learning goal, a specific exercise or project at home.
A number of parents mentioned this example as something for which they could not take the initiative to direct their child without receiving the teacher's advice.
A particular example was that of a father who needed guidance about how much attention to place on drawing activities at home and was advised to demand from the child to devote time on drawing or on any similar activity only if the emphasis was on the drawing as such, but to spent a minimum time on it when drawing was a side-activity of an exercise.
Time spent on studying at home for homework purposes seemed as of core interest for participant parents.
Parents were bringing up the issue quite systematically, either when their child would spend too much or too little time for doing his/her homework.
A Grade 3 father, for instance, brought up this issue when he visited his son's teacher during the school year's first term, since the child was spending more than three hours per day in order to complete his homework obligations, something which the family considered as outrageous for a child of his age.
The discussion led, as the father himself explained, to a mutual agreement between the parent and the teacher that the child would be obliged to end his studying after one and a half hours of studying, and if not finished to face the consequences of not finishing his homework the next day at school, something which solved the 'problem'.
	Relevant aspects were also issues like handling the case when the child feels boredom or laziness while studying at home.
This appeared to be a more intense issue in discussion at the end of the school year, when pupils were expecting the closure of the schools and summer weather exhausted them.
The following is from a relevant section of the conversation between a parent and a teacher during the last visit of this parent at the teacher:
Mother: I must admit that she is bored during the last days.
You understand...to feel boredom, not wanting to study.
She doesn't have...she is tired.
You know...
Teacher: It is the weather.
Isn't it all of us who are falling apart?
Parents' Use of their Communication with the Teacher
Participant parents stressed with no exception that after attending a briefing with their children's teachers they aim at cooperating with them in order to overcome specific difficulties.
Parents generally maintained moreover, that they try to implement teachers' suggestions and what they agreed on, and that what they actually do is to &try to implement the teacher advices&.
The aim of parents, as most of them maintained, is to support their child in &making progress& and &becoming better& on the issues discussed during their contact with the teacher.
Quite impressive was the conclusion that both parents and teachers consented that via their contacts &things go better for the child&.
It appeared clear additionally that all teachers and most parents across sites were accommodated with the perception that parents, having being informed by teachers about their child's school attainment, share whole the responsibility to support the child to transcend his/her 'learning difficulties' or 'behaviour problems'.
Hence, most parents systematically reported that what they expect by meeting teachers is for them to find out &the way to help our [their] child&.
Most parents' initial response after a meeting with the teacher was to inform their spouse or the other family adult who was absent with what was conferred and concluded.
Depending on the families' schedules, this briefing was followed or preceded by a discussion with the child himself/herself on the content and conclusions of the parent's meeting with the teacher.
The most typical parental response when asked during individual interviews to provide examples of their actions after a personal contact with the teacher was that they 'discuss' with the child the content of their meeting and 'explain' to the child what the teacher said.
While 'discussing' and 'explaining' to their child, some parents indicated that they try to translate what was discussed with the teacher &in the child's own words&, so that the child comprehends the adults' talk.
During this initial parent-child conversation, some parents pointed out that they try to exhibit to their child their respect to the teacher's suggestions, as well as their trust for the teacher's expertise and accountability.
Usually, in case the teacher's message was positive, this parent-child discussion was accompanied by an applaud of the child's efforts or by a commitment for achieving better results until the next teacher-parent contact.
In case the teacher's information pointed out a 'fault' of the child, some parents admitted that they did not hesitate to reproach their child.
Usually, the parent-child discussion appeared to end with the parent's admonition to the child that the next meeting the teacher would to tell the parent that the child is &getting better&.
After this initial declaration of aims and intentions, it appears that participant parents subsequent actions varied substantially, with different families recruiting extremely different ways of action.
A careful investigation of parental responses to the interviews revealed that families' succeeding behaviour could be distinguished into four broad types of families (a diagrammatical illustration of these types of families is presented in the Appendix, p. 27).
First, there was the group type of parents who could be called the 'indifferent-like' or 'apathetic-like' parents.
These were the parents who, due to a series of factors and regardless of educational background, socio-economic status or ability, claimed that they would not enter any further systematic attempt to support their child according to the briefing.
These parents were consciously against further supporting their child at home and believed that they should not be assigned such role or be expected to contribute in such way in their child's day-to-day schooling.
Some of these parents, for instance, supported that it is the school's responsibility to provide all the necessary support to the child, that the parent should not have to intervene at all, or that schools should not demand from the family to deal with academic aspects of their child's schooling.
Some of the parents whose child was attending the upper grades had particular beliefs regarding the age until which they should care about these matters.
They explained their views saying that parents should terminate their immediate support to their children's day-to-day schooling after primary school ages or other particular school thresholds, for instance after the first Grade.
In order to justify their views, the more educated parents of this category sited their perceptions on building their children's self-independence and self-confidence.
Less educated parents evaluated their academic 'knowledge level' and thought themselves as unable to implement teachers' suggestions and directions.
Parents who believed that their child was a high achiever, thought that they did not need support their children's school activities.
The other three identified types of families, though distinguishable in some respects, shared a common overall aspiration about education.
Despite the fact that the proceeding behaviour of these families in applying the teacher's directions intervened with their characteristics like their educational and socio-economic background, working conditions, time constraints, and academic efficiency, they all exhibited an overall educational aptitude, orientation and inclination, what could be described better with the Greek word 'ephesis' ('desire') for education.
All three types of these families quite systematically appeared to try to accommodate, successfully or unsuccessfully, support or supervision according to their conversation with the teachers, in order to enhance their child's school performance.
Their ephesis in educating their children, as they all explained, was much stronger than any pragmatic or perceptual constraint that the 'indifferent-like' parents called upon.
Some of these families, those who could be called the 'good-will, but no action' families, were families who exhibited good-will and ambitious intentions to assist their child according to the briefing's concluding suggestions, but eventually, as they revealed, did no appeared entering any other endeavour.
These parents' intervention concentrated on obscure and tentative actions.
As they claimed, their main action after a briefing was to &discuss what the teacher suggested with the child and provide him/her with the appropriate advices&, &advice the child in the best way& or even &advice the child to do the right thing and listen to his/her teachers&.
Some other systematic reactions of these parents were to stress to the child that &the teacher wants you [the child] to try a little bit more&, and &talk to the child in a good way in order to try to make him/her comprehend his/her mistake so that he/she stops doing it&.
This category of parents terminated their intervention at this superficial discussion-type intervention, probably because they felt inadequate in offering further support to their child or that they were academically incompetent.
Low education, rural area parents and parents of low achievers who participated in this study mainly constituted this category of parents.
The second type of parents, 'not knowing how' parents, showed a similar pattern of behaviour after their contact with the teacher, but afterwards entered into a more distinctive countermove.
More specifically, most of these parents appeared to move further from a superficial admonishment and kept trying to remind the child what the/she should be doing.
These parents were also not very successful in practice, probably because they had difficulty in translating or implementing what the teacher suggested or even due to lacking practical step-by-step suggestions or tips from the teacher's side.
A typical case of mother who fits in this category of parents provided a specific example of what followed her contact with her child's teacher:
My child's teacher told me that my child was sometimes talking a little with the child sitting next to him.
I was constantly making this remark to my child and I was asking from him to pay more attention to the teacher and talk to the other child only during the break.
At other times, these parents claimed that they succeeded, &I tried to help my child [as the teacher suggested or in order to 'solve' the 'problem'], and he/she finally made it& or &made a lot of progress&, but their success appeared to have an ambivalent value.
Both previous and the following examples demonstrate that these parents, who constituted a significant proportion of this study's parents, did not have practical tips to help their child achieve what the teacher suggested: &When my daughter was doing a lot of spelling mistakes, I sat next to her in order to remind her some grammatical rules while she was writing&.
Low and average education parents of all types of achievers, in both rural and urban sites, fit in this category of parents.
The last group of parents identified were the 'close to education' parents.
These parents probably due to their ability to comprehend and handle the information and directions provided by their child's teacher and/or due to being granted with sufficient information by teachers seemed being effective in supporting their child.
These were mostly educated parents whose children were not facing particular difficulties with their schooling.
These parents appeared to be capable of strategically responding to teachers' directions and adjusting them in their family's particular conditions.
Thus, after an initial and generic discussion with their child similar to all other parents, they were more likely to implement consciously or impulsively the teacher's suggestions and a set of specific strategies.
Most of the 'close to education' parents intensively tried to &cover the space& and &surpass the deficiency&, by supporting their child with daily exercise and practice, if the teacher had suggested that the child needed improvement.
They appeared more or less conscious of a particular role they had to play, place the responsibility for their child's success on themselves and thus differed from other types of parents.
Most of these parents tended to schedule an initial intervention period during which they closely supervised their child's homework and exercises.
Usually, their support took the form of a scaffold, which was very soon withdrawn for the child to study effectively alone with the minimum of supervision.
Moreover, as some of them indicated, most times they tried not to overwhelm their child by telling him/her &to deal with all points that need[ed] to receive more attention at once&.
Rather they followed teachers' example to focus only on the most significant issues, e.g. reading, spelling, etc, and only when this was overcome to deal with the rest.
They also stressed that they were considerably careful not to put too much pressure on their child or as a mother stated &to ask for something he [the child] cannot do&.
This occurred, for example, when they estimated that this might have been above their capacities, or that the circumstances were not ideal, e.g. if the child was tired.
These parents were more likely to continue to support their child even when the teacher told them that their child's attainment was satisfactory.
When the teacher had referred to the child's school behaviour, 'close to education' parents claimed that they directed a skilful, sophisticated and long lasting discussion with their child in order to deal with the issue in consideration.
The following father described his experience after a personal contact with his son teacher, which focused on a specific 'behaviour problem':
After I talk to the teacher, I think about it.
What I do then is &dialogue with the child& so that I understand his motives and his psychology that urged him in the specific behaviour.
We always try to find solution with the child [father's emphasis].
I listen to him, and we take decisions together.
As in the above case, these parents tended to stress more than the other parents words like 'discussion', 'respect', and 'not-imposing' to describe their efforts.
Another specific illustration of how a mother dealt with the information she received by the teacher is the following:
The teacher told me that, even though he is definite that the child knows a specific answer, he doesn't always raise his hand to answer the question.
When I went home, I discussed it with my child and he didn't deny it.
He said: &Many times I raise my hand but he [the teacher] tells other children to answer the question&.
I explained that the teacher has to check all children by assigning them to write something on the blackboard or to reply to one of his questions.
Now, after many discussions, he has comprehended this.
The last quote demonstrates additionally these parents ability to provide their own solutions, or extent on teachers' solutions, when handling issues relating to their child's schooling and the information they receive by their children's teachers.
Some of these parents appeared to set specific aims and specific deadlines for the implementation of what was decided to be done, in order for the child to make the optimal progress until the parent's next visit at school.
Sometimes these deadlines were co-decided with the child, whereas other times parents tried to keep them themselves.
Interestingly, 'close to education' parents were found to be generally critical towards teachers' advices and directions.
As a rural area and educated mother claimed, &I listen carefully and try to achieve what the teacher advices me, if only [mother's emphasis] I believe that this is the best for my child's interest&.
Similarly, an urban area parent clarified that after meeting their child's teacher they, &being the parents of the child, decide what should be done&, and a middle class mother stressed that she abides by the teacher's advices, if she believes that these &are for the child's good sake&.
An outcome of teacher-parent briefings across the three latter family types was for these families to arrange private lessons by an expert for the child.
Sometimes this was after the teacher's direct advice and at other times after parental initiation.
The phenomenon was more frequent in the urban than in the rural sites, and in most cases this was employed when a child had 'learning difficulties'.
An example was the case of a low educated, rural area mother who admitted that &after being informed by the teacher that my [her] child was weak and understood that I [she] couldn't help the child more, I [she] sent him for private lessons&.
Not surprisingly, in the case of 'good-will, but no action' and 'not knowing how' parents, due to not knowing how to transcend their school-related difficulties but still wanting their child to &go better& in school, some of them employ the help of other familiar people who &have more capabilities& than them, probably also because they could not afford the expenses of professional trainers.
Some sought refuge to professional and experts when the teacher revealed a 'behaviour problem' or a 'deviant behaviour'.
Only rarely rural area and lower education parents said doing so, whereas it was more parents in urban areas who admitted that they might easily seek advice from an expert to this end.
As a mother in one of the urban sites explained &When there is a problem and I need assistance from more educated people than me in order to help my child, I do so&.
In another case, after a mother contacted her child's teacher, she succeeded in dealing with her child's behaviour, as it is illustrated in the following quote, by cooperating with both the specialist and the teacher and herself.
My child was demonstrating aggressive behaviour.
When the teacher informed us, we visited a clinical psychologist for advice.
We then informed the [child's] teacher and cooperated in order to help the child to exceed it, as happened.
Conclusions
This section of the paper draws out interpretations, which derive from the data analysis.
One of the main conclusions of this study is that the content of parents and teachers briefings focused on specific aspects of the children's school-life, and particularly the child's school achievement, behaviour, and homework activities.
Distinguishable patterns in the use of the information received amongst different types of parents.
Particular groups of parents could neither interpret nor effectively exploit the information they received during their contacts with their child's teacher in order to support their children's schooling.
Apart from the minority of 'indifferent-like' or 'apathetic-like' parents who for a series of idiosyncratic or other factors did not appear willing to support their children after their briefings with teachers, most other parents declared their support or supervision of their child's schoolwork according to their conversation with teachers.
What distinguished these other parents from 'apathetic-like' parents was that they all appeared to cultivate a family culture of educational 'ephesis', which was identified across these families, regardless of their socio-economic or local background characteristics and practical constraints and realities.
This family culture seemed to transcend their personal or family stances, opinions or constrains in whether or not they would support their child's schoolwork, and thus they were urged to genuinely consider teachers' instructions and try to put them into practice.
Their eventual success in sustaining an effective implementation of their declared purposes, nonetheless, is likely to be dependent on their families' characteristics and particularly their personal or family educational and cultural recourses.
More specifically, even though the 'good-will, but no action' families and 'not knowing how' parents showed evidence of attempting to put in practice what was concluded during their briefings with teachers, their intervention was more likely to be unsuccessful.
Both groups felt inadequate and incompetent to comprehend and handle the information and directions provided by the teacher in order to offer systematic and concrete support to their children.
The former were likely to exhaust their intervention in concentrating on obscure and tentative advices towards their children, whereas the latter, who tended to be more practical, seemed using tentative and ambivalent approaches in a clumsy, spasmodic and improvising manner.
No matter how confident they left their meeting with the teacher, how they felt they had understood their child's school attainment realities and what they should do in practice, this did not correspond to what the teacher attempted to communicate to them or was not eventually implemented in a successful manner.
In most cases, these families were coming from deprived educational backgrounds, found in both urban and, more frequently, rural areas.
On the contrary, it was more 'close to education' families who seemed capable of responding to teachers' directions and employing a strategic plan to support their child's school life, thus suggesting an educational stratification among families that further disadvantages the disadvantaged families.
A second and equally important conclusion was that 'good-will, but no action' and 'not knowing how' families faced extreme difficulties in comprehending teachers' suggestions and considered that the directions and advices they received by teachers were too abstract and general, thus leaving them with a lot to understand on their own.
Even though teachers were urging all parents to support their child according to their mutual decisions during their briefings, often teachers' guidelines to parents were not detailed enough and did not take the form of step-by-step practical tips, which would be easily implemented.
Once again, it was mostly 'close to education' parents who managed to better utilise teachers' feedback.
This occurred either because they were more able to comprehend teachers' language or because they were receiving more information by teachers, who from their part, were feeling that they are more understood by these parents.
These parents might even be more demanding in receiving detailed information during their briefings with teachers.
It might be finally the case that these parents would know how to support their children in any case and that what their actual aim of contacting teachers is, is to receive teachers' evaluation of their child's school performance in order to intervene at home and enhance it.
This conclusion might suggest a weakness on behalf of teachers to provide this more detailed and concrete information which will guide parents to support their children at home, either due to lack of adequate relevant education or even due to lack of appropriate communication skills.
Participant teachers' attempts to communicate with parents did not appear adequate in order to transfer effectively their message to those groups of parents who exhibited a particular difficulty in talking the school's and the teachers' 'language'.
This might indicate also teachers' perception that briefings with parents are mostly for them to communicate their own perspective about children and to indicate parents what their responsibilities are.
In conclusion, the ability or the background of the family to deal with educational issues might be the determinant factors in parents' success to make effective use of the information they receive by teachers during their contacts with them.
Even though these parents are mostly found in middle and high-class families, participant families in this study living in difficult environments also managed to successfully support their children by following teachers' directions.
It was not poverty, poorness in the financial sense or their social conditions as such that determined this success, rather than being enough educated to be highly motivated and confident about school knowledge and approaches.
Families who appeared to have educational resources, which were not so different from those required in the school, were managing to effectively support their children as indicated by the school.
In other cases, the parents had little education and/or their own educational and pedagogical experiences were limited or quite different from the school's pedagogical approaches.
They thus appeared to handle limited or irrelevant to school educational ad cultural resources and could not contribute significantly to their child's school successes.
Even though these parents do come to school, demonstrate their genuine interest for sustaining a vivid relation with the school for the child's sake and to try to support their child at home in an overall family educational 'ephesis' milieu, they manage to practically contribute very little or offer assistance of ambivalent value.
This study reveals that, unfortunately, the proportion of families that belong in this category of parents is substantial.
Implications
This study's findings have both theoretical and practical importance, which could draw out implications for pedagogy, for educational policy and for research, for there is a serious paucity of previous research in the area of teacher-parent information exchange.
In terms of pedagogy and educational policy, the research's main implications concern the aim, content and outcomes of teacher-parent briefings, by providing indications as regards the types of information that families and schools recognise as the most important and efficient for supporting children in their school learning.
This is of particular importance when it comes to how this information reaches children and whether it has any influence on them.
The study revealed that, despite the pedagogical value placed on teacher-parent briefings, these might not succeed in fulfilling their purpose of enhancing children's school performance for all pupils and that they might even consolidate or widen existing stratification among pupils of certain family environments.
Should teacher-parent briefings have pedagogical value, this value must be equally distributed to all families.
Teachers therefore need to be more conscious of the differences across parents and their various abilities and needs according to their educational background.
They should find ways in fulfilling these different needs by adopting skilful approaches, which aim at communicating effectively with each parent.
They must also realise that what happens during any contact is of critical importance and that the vast majority of parents reach the school with high expectations of cooperation with teachers in order to enhance their child's schoolwork.
It is the teachers' task to find the ways to offer them all the proper types of information and communicate this in the most appropriate manner for each particular parent so that all parents depart from the school knowing what and how they need to support their child so the child manages better at school.
Consequently, this study introduces significant recommendations that are applicable for policy-makers and teacher and parent training programs.
In particularly for teachers, there is an immediate need for their training during their pre-service and in-service education to improve their communication skills when working in diverse contexts with parents of different educational, socioeconomic and ethnical backgrounds.
Teachers' ability of knowing how to communicate effectively, and how to end the conversation graciously, summarising any agreements and understandings is crucial.
At the same time, both teachers and parents must be trained in order to obtain communication 'literacy'.
The aim of this training should be for both sides to become literate on this aspect of their lives, in order to maintain a critical stance towards the information they exchange, by judging and criticising it, and identifying important and useful information from 'unimportant informing'.
Moreover, staff development activities could be especially critical for novice teachers providing significant experiences from which they can begin building their relevant professional bases.
As positive educational change only occurs through changes in teachers' attitudes towards the family environment, any staff development, professional development, professional renewal, continuing or in-service education must be the most important family-school activity a school system or particular school could launch.
Finally, in terms of research, this study might initiate further debate in relation to the issue, which can constitute the basis for further research and investigations and the formulation of action in real school settings.
In particularly, it indicates that there is a further need to develop such studies which will refine the concepts presented in this paper, in particular the concept of the educational 'ephesis' of families and their educational resources, with respect to qualitative accounts and approaches.
This research could draw on Bourdieu's views of cultural capital (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1990), which might assist in looking at and describing relationships between parent-school communications and shed some light on their complexities.
Bourdieu's views, as well as Lareau's (2000) similar ideas could be potentially powerful ideas in describing, understanding, and seeking similarities or discrepancies between cultural resources of families and schools, in particular as far as the educational aspects of these recourses.
Of similar importance would be to empirically explore teacher-parent communication by drawing on Moll's and his colleagues concept of 'funds of knowledge' (Moll, Amanti, Neff, & Gonzalez, 1992) in order to identify asymmetries in family-school communication, as this study attempted to do, and revisit both formal and informal communications between families and schools.
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This document was added to the Education-line database on 24 September 2003