This book is based on the empirical work of a large-scale project to investigate the possible impacts of diversified forms of parental involvement on children and school by first exploring through a series of ethnographic case studies how principals, teachers and parents perceive and act on parental involvement in the primary schools of Hong Kong and, then, examining how the different forms and levels of parental involvement are related to individual and institutional factors through a series of survey studies on all these stakeholders in childrens education. Finally, the book assesses the extent to which different forms of parental involvement affect student performance based on student survey results and available school records.

HO Sui Chu Estheris Professor in the Department of Educational Administration and Policy and Co-Director of Hong Kong Institute of Educational Research (HKIER) and the Hong Kong Centre for International Student Assessment (HKPISA Centre) at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She is also Principal Investigator of the Home School Collaboration Project. She has previously been a teacher in respectively primary and secondary schools in Hong Kong; Fulbright Scholar at Pennsylvania State University (2004) and Johns Hopkins University (2010); Research Associate of the project Education and Development in South China; Teaching Assistant and Research Assistant at the University of British Columbia, Canada; Teaching Consultant of the World Bank in the District Primary Educational Program, India. She has taught courses on School Effectiveness and School Restructuring; Educational Policy and Practice in Hong Kong; Family, Community and School: Policy& Practice; Education and Society in Hong Kong; Quantitative Analysis in Classroom& School Settings. Her research interests focus on parental involvement in childrens education, home school community collaboration, school effectiveness and school reform, decentralisation and school-based management, research methodology in education, multilevel analysis in educational research.

KWONG Wai Man received his M.S.W. degree at the University of Hong Kong, counselling training at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), University of Toronto. He studied the process of professional learning and changes of social workers for his Ph.D. degree at the University of Bristol. He began teaching in the City Polytechnic of Hong Kong in 1984, and is currently the Programme Leader of the MSSC programme of the City University of Hong Kong. His research interest covers a number of areas: parentingand parent education, parent involvement and school improvement, counselling and counsellor education, youth resilience, professional education and professional learning. He is currently working on two counselling research projects, one on the professional artistry of listening for understanding in counselling and the other on the practice of embedded counselling in health care setting. He is also working on a knowledge transfer project on eliciting clinical knowledge of experienced counsellors and the development of case study pedagogy for teaching clinical knowledge, a teaching development grant project on the development of a language-based approach to counselling, and an idea incubator project to develop the approach and resource materials for providing narrative career counselling to university students.

Chapter 1 Literature Review.- Chapter 2 Elucidating the Complexity of Parental Involvement in Primary Schools: Three Ethnographic Case Studies.- Chapter 3 Building a Grounded Theory on Parental Involvement in Education.- Chapter 4 Nature of Parental Involvement: Perspectives from Principals, Teachers and Parents.- Chapter 5 Effects of Parental Involvement and Investment on Student Learning.- Chapter 6 Conclusions and Implications.