Virtual schooling is fast becoming a mainstream option for today’s generation of learners. Greater numbers of students and parents are demanding access to distance education opportunities, increasing the amount of public funding allocated to. While virtual schooling at the K-12 level has grown in popularity, research-based investigations into successful teaching, learning and student support processes are limited. There are guidelines and standards for instructional practices in online settings, mainly produced by leading organizations in teaching and learning, including The American Federation of Teachers, Sloan-C, American Distance Education Council, Southern Regional Educational Board, National Education Association, and the North American Council for Online Learning. However, most guidelines remain non-empirical adaptations of face-to-face practices, whose primary focus is on guidelines for course development and pedagogical practice.

There is reason to believe that the role of familial involvement in virtual schooling could be as important, if not more important than its role in traditional schooling. Unfortunately, contemporary studies on parental involvement only address face-to-face student populations. Therefore, the study of parental involvement and its relationship to virtual school student achievement could assist the development of new communication strategies between virtual schools, teachers and parents that will lead to improvement in student achievement.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the role of familial participation in student's achievement in K-12 virtual schools. To address this question, this study employed an online survey adapted from research by Hoover-Dempsey and Sandler, sampling parents from a virtual school in the Southeastern U.S. Quantitative statistical procedures were utilized to analyze the resulting data.

Outcomes indicate that parent-student interactions do have predictive effect related to student achievement, parents and students differ in their perceptions of each other’s involvement in the academic process, and demographic variables such as gender and socioeconomic status affect the level of parental involvement perceived by students. Implications related to these findings can be used to increase the effectiveness of homeschool communications, develop comprehensive communications policies for virtual school employees, develop and deliver instructional materials for parents in order to promote efficacious interaction with their children regarding academic work and develop a broader understanding of the ancillary environment associated with virtual school students.