Research On Primary School Teachers’ Attitudes Regarding Home-School Partnership And Its Influencing Factors

School-family partnership has become a very important issue in educational reform around the world. Teachers are dominant forces in building a healthy school-family partnership and teachers’ attitudes regarding school-family partnership would directly exert great impact on the quantity and quality of school-family interaction. A good understanding of teachers’ authentic attitudes will help school leaders improve school-family collaboration effectively and form a healthy school-family relationship.This study employed questionnaire survey as methodology. The population consisted of 120 primary school teachers from 1st to 5th grades from six public primary schools in Hongkou district, Shanghai. Based on Epstein et al.’s 6 typologies of parental involvement, this study divided school-family partnership into six types: parenting, communicating, volunteering, homework instruction, decision making and collaborating with the community; and examined teachers’ attitudes to each type of school-family partnership from three perspectives:cognition, emotion and behavioral tendencies. T-test, F-test, ANOVA test, post hoc analyses and Kruskal-Wails H test were used to examine teachers’ demographic factors which may influence teachers’ attitudes regarding school-family partnership including education level, gender, teaching experience, students’ grades and Banzhuren/non-Banzhuren.Results indicated that, overall, teachers reported positive views about school-family partnership. Teachers showed positive emotional experience and active behavioral tendencies on parenting, communicating, volunteering, homework instruction, and collaborating with the community. But they showed cold shoulders to the type of "decision making". While teachers are more positive to parents and communicating with parents, individualism and conservatism are still very obvious in their attitudes regarding school-family partnership.Findings also indicated that teachers’ demographic factors only exerted a slight impact on teachers’ attitudes regarding school-family partnerships. There was no significant differences between Banzhuren and non-Banzhuren; male teachers were less confident in parents’ parenting abilities but more welcoming in "decision making" than female teachers. Education level, teaching experiences, students’ grades did have significant difference in certain dimensionalities of teachers’ attitudes. However, there were no definite correlation.Based on the results, this paper offered some proposals to school practices and teacher training on school-family partnership. Suggestions on school practices include providing opportunities for teachers to communicate with parents face to face, distributing the tasks of school-family partnership to all teachers and sticking to a moderate principle. Suggestions on teacher training include deepening the training materials, expanding the scope of trainees and innovative the training form.