Validity and reliability of the Parental Homework Management Scale.

Background: Prior research has shown that parents help their children manage homework (i.e. environment, time, motivation and emotion management), especially in elementary school. However, researchers have not developed and validated a scale focused on those dimensions.

Method: The purpose of the present study is to validate the Parental Homework Management Scale (PHMS) for parents of elementary school children in the domain of mathematics. A sample of 2,118 parent-child dyads was split randomly into two groups to conduct the analysis in two stages: (i) exploratory factor analysis on Group 1 and (ii) confirmatory factor analysis on Group 2.

Results: PHMS is comprised of two distinct but related factors (i.e. environment-time and motivation-emotion management). Results further indicated that the PHMS was positively related to homework self-regulation and positive emotions, and negatively related to math achievement. Contrary to expectations, no relationship was found between PHMS and amount of student homework completed.

Conclusions: The scale revealed good psychometric quality.