Date of Award

Summer 8-2013

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Educational Leadership and School Counseling

Committee Chair

Rose McNeese

Committee Chair Department

Educational Leadership and School Counseling

Committee Member 2

J. T. Johnson

Committee Member 3

David Lee

Committee Member 3 Department

Educational Leadership and School Counseling

Committee Member 4

Michael Ward

Committee Member 4 Department

Educational Leadership and School Counseling

Abstract

Research has shown that student performance increases when parents become more involved in their children’s education, and the positive influence of parental involvement has been shown to persist across racial, gender, and socio-economic barriers (Miller, Adsit, & Miller, 2005). As a result, an increasing number of schools have sought to use the Internet as a tool to engage parents (Swann & Fenner, 2005). The purpose of this study was to examine the effectiveness of using the mobile web as a tool to help facilitate increased parental communication and involvement at the secondary level. It examined the relationship between socio-economic status, the availability of a mobile version of a school site, and the frequency with which users accessed school websites using the mobile web. The researcher also sought to investigate the extent to which school webmasters had up-to-date knowledge of both traditional and mobile web design. While results from the study did not reveal a significant relationship between the socio-economic make-up of a school and the frequency with which stakeholders accessed either mobile or traditional school websites, an overwhelming majority of the correlations that were computed represented a large effect size. It seems possible that a larger sample size might have revealed a significant relationship. Results from the survey revealed that high school webmasters are generally knowledgeable about the principles of mobile web design, but that they are dissatisfied with the amount of training that they received to help prepare them to serve in that capacity.

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