Teacher–families online interactions and gender differences in parental involvement through school data system: Do mothers want to know more than fathers about their children?

The integration of School Systems in K-12, opens new possibilities for online interaction among teachers, students, and their parents. This paper examines three years of teacher–student and teacher–parent online interactions in seven Israeli secondary schools during the implementation of a school system called Mashov (meaning “feedback” in Hebrew, as well as the acronym of “Immediacy, Transparency, and Supervision”). The three hypotheses were supported: (1) Consistent with the Diffusion of Innovation Theory (Rogers, 2003), findings revealed that implementation time positively influence both logging into the system as well as sending messages to and receiving messages from teachers, students, and parents; (2) Similarly to gender differences in offline parental involvement, the findings showed that compared to fathers, mothers have higher level of online parental involvement – they log more into the system and send more messages to teachers. Moreover, mother activity was in accordance with levels of teacher activity in the system; (3) Consistent with the approach of implementing changes in schools by expanding circles of interactions beyond the teaching staff, teacher entering of pedagogical data on a daily basis improved the use of the system by students and their parents. Students and parents' logins into the system was significantly higher in classes taught by high activity teachers than in classes taught by low activity teachers. It seems that students and parents in classes taught by high activity teachers regularly logged into the system in order to receive pedagogical information. We recommend that teachers and school administrators seek ways for augmenting the online activity of teachers and encourage fathers to have higher levels of parental involvement.

► Teachers, students and parents' interactions via school data system were examined.
► Implementation time impacted logins and message exchanges among the participants.
► Students and parents used the system more in classes of high-activity teachers.
► Mothers had higher level of online parental involvement compared to fathers.
► Only mothers' activity level corresponded to teacher activity within the system.