עזרה של הורים לילדיהם הלומדים בבתי-ספר יסודיים, בשיעורי בית ובלמידה בזירה הביתית: בניית כלי מדידה ותיקופו הראשוני באמצעות מתודות מחקר משולבות

Parental involvement has become dynamic and significant in recent decades and is reflected in the school and home arenas. The current study focuses on parental involvement in the home arena by examining the help provided by parents to their children with homework and learning processes at home. The help relations theory defines different patterns of giving help, distinguished by the type of help and the degree of its contribution to the children: autonomous help and dependent help. The current study applied this theory in the context of the helping relationship between parents and their children. The study was based on a combination of quantitative and qualitative approaches. In the first stage, interviews were conducted with 24elementary school parents and teachers about parental help with homework.A clear distinction emerged from the interviews between the two types of help:autonomous and dependent. In addition, three sub-themes of dependent help emerged from the inductive analysis in the field: the parent as a partner, the parent as a reminder, and the parent as a student. Subsequently, the four help patterns found were developed into items in a questionnaire administered to parents of elementary school children. The factor analysis of the questionnaire structure and its psychometric characteristics were examined using a sample of 255 parents of elementary school children. Identifying the different types of dependent help constitutes an extension of the theory of help-giving orientations. They mainly indicate the expansion of help patterns whose meaning should be examined in the field of education. The questionnaire development processes and the meanings of the types of help provided will be presented in detail in this article.