Educational Achievement And Educational Attainment

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Educational achievement is an important adolescent issue. As compared to that of children, educational achievement during adolescent has greater implication on one’s future. Steinberg (2013) defines educational achievement in three different but related concepts; school performance which refers to grades obtained in school, academic achievement which refers to student’s performance in standardised test and educational attainment which is defined as number of years of schooling completed by a student. Many research have been conducted regarding this topic to find the factors that can explain the differences in students’ educational achievement. Although studies have shown that personal factors such as student’s ability and motivation affect his or her achievement significantly, environmental factors are also extremely crucial (Eccles & Roeser, 2011). One of the most discussed environmental factors is home environment. It is said to be a better predictor of educational achievement than school environment (Azmita, Cooper & Brown, 2009). However, home environment is a broad term and there are many ways in which student home situation can affect their educational achievement. One of them is parental values on education (Steinberg, 2013). In simpler term, this refers to how important education is to parents. Research has shown that the higher the values parents put on education, the better their children educational achievement (Jodl, Micheal, Malanchuk, Ecles & Sameroff, 2001). Parental values on education are usually shown through their expectation and involvement in their children’s education (Steinberg, 2013). Undoubtedly, these influence all three concepts of educational achievement.
Parents who put high value on education are mor...

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... in children educational achievement.
To conclude, family factors such as parental values are significant in predicting one’s educational outcomes. Studies have shown that parents who put higher values on education can encourage their children to earn better grades in schools, higher scores in standardised test and higher school-leaving qualification. Therefore, more research should be done on how to increase parental value on education and how parents can express it so that it can be helpful in their children’s studies. Furthermore, researches should also put more focus on the effect of mediators in this area of study as it can give us better understanding of how to improve student achievement. It is also recommended that more studies to be done on how to improve the effectiveness of parent-focused programmes that will help in improving their values on education.

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