Complexities in field-based partnership research: Exemplars, challenges, and an agenda for the field

The benefits of engaging families in children's education are among the most convincing and consistent findings in the educational literature. There is overwhelming research support attesting to the effects of parent involvement and family-school partnership practices to positively advance children's educational trajectories. Trends in the research suggest that family-based educational interventions appear to be most successful when they (a) involve collaborative partnering between families and schools; (b) promote healthy relationships between families and schools, and parents and children; and (c) use evidence-based parent and teacher practices. Two family-school partnership interventions, Getting Ready (Sheridan, Marvin, Knoche, and Edwards, 2008 ) and Conjoint Behavioral Consultation (CBC; Sheridan and Kratochwill, 2008 ) exemplify these current trends. In this chapter, we describe our experiences conducting partnership research as we have developed and tested these models over the last 25 years. We first define our approach to partnership intervention research by distinguishing between parental involvement practices and family-school partnerships. We discuss a sample of our research activities associated with Getting Ready and CBC, present a number of challenges we have encountered in the conduct of our partnership research, and propose a research agenda to advance the empirical work on family-school partnerships.