This study was conducted to examine different factors influencing the academic performance of secondary school students in a metropolitan city of Pakistan. The respondents for this study were 10 th grade students (300 male & 300 female). A survey was conducted by using a questionnaire for information gathering about different factors relating to academic performance of students. The academic performance was gauged by the result of their 9th grade annual examination. Standard t-test and ANOVA were applied to investigate the effect of different factors on students’ achievement. The results of the study revealed that socioeconomic status (SES) and parents’ education have a significant effect on students’ overall academic achievement as well as achievement in the subjects of Mathematics and English. The high and average socio-economic level affects the performance more than the lower level. It is very interesting that parents’ education means more than their occupation in relation to their children’s academic performance at school. It was found that girls perform better than the male students.

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Factors affecting students' quality of academic performance: a case of secondary school level

In this study, we suggest that the difficulty in defining, locating, and measuring social capital is at core a philosophical confusion of language, and not just a consequence of excessively wide application. The term ‘‘capital’’ refers to resources for investment. Financial capital consists of specific quantities of assets. Human capital, a metaphorical extension of financial capital, also consists of specific quantities of assets, in the form of skills or credentials. However, social capital, a third metaphorical construction, does not consist of resources that are held by individuals or by groups but of processes of social interaction leading to constructive outcomes. Therefore, we argue, social capital is not located at any one level of analysis: it emerges across levels of analysis. The confusion over the meaning of this term, then, is a consequence of a metaphorical confusion of a substantive quantity (capital) and a process that takes place through stages (embedded, goal-directed social relations). Locating and defining social capital is further complicated by the variability, contextuality, and conditionality of the process. Stages of social relations that lead to constructive outcomes for one group of people or in one situation may not lead to constructive outcomes for another group or in another situation. To illustrate empirically how social capital may be thought of as a process consisting of stages and to demonstrate why the concept is inherently problematic, we employ data from the 1995 interviews of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health). These data enable us to examine connections among the stages of the social capital process found in the literature and to look at predictors of academic achievement, a central topic in research on this topic.

Social Capital as Process: The Meanings and Problems of a Theoretical Metaphor

A person-oriented approach examined patterns of functioning in social and executive function domains at 54 months and in turn forecasted 5th-grade socioemotional and achievement outcomes for 944 children. Six distinct profiles of 54-month school readiness patterns predicted outcomes in 5th grade with indications of cross-domain association between 54-month performance and later functioning. A group of children at 54 months characterized by low working memory exhibited elevated levels of socioemotional problems and low achievement in 5th grade. Patterns in which high social competence or high working memory were prominent predicted high 5th-grade achievement. Unexpectedly, a group distinguished by attention problems performed well on later achievement outcomes. After controlling for children's early demographics, readiness profiles accounted for math achievement in 5th grade.

Patterns of school readiness forecast achievement and socioemotional development at the end of elementary school.

This study examines the influence of schoolmate family structure, racial concentration, and socioeconomic status on the academic achievement of individual African American and White students The data are drawn from the 1990 test results of 18,000 10th graders who took the Louisiana Graduation Exit Examination The study finds that being surrounded by schoolmates from female-headed families had the second largest negative association with the academic achievement of African Americans, greater in effect than the association of academic achievement with individual family structure It appears that the negative effect of concentrations of African Americans in schools may be largely attributed to the association of minority concentration schools with high percentages of female-headed families Key Words: academic achievement African Americans family struture, two-parent families, mothers Despite a narrowing of the gap in educational attainment between African American children and White children, there are still disturbing inequalities in the educational outcomes of the two major racial groups in the United States According to a 1994 report of the US Department of Education, African Americans are at a disadvantage in "preschool attendance, grade retention, academic achievement, dropout rates, parental involvement, school climate, course-taking patterns, educational aspirations, labor market outcomes, and adult literacy patterns" (p 9) Not only do African American and White children have unequal outcomes from their school years, they often spend these years in different educational and familial environments According to the National School Boards Association, about two thirds of African American school children were attending segregated schools in the 1990s (Orfield & Monfort, 1992) African American students are more likely to report that they feel unsafe in their schools, that their learning is disrupted by other students, and that they have problems getting along with teachers (U S Department of Education, 1994, p 11) Finally, the majority (65%) of African Americans in 1990 who were younger than 18 years old lived in single-parent households, but the majority (76%) of White minors lived in households with two parents (US Bureau of the Census, 1992) Thus, African American children tend to go to segregated schools with disruptive and unsafe environments, and the majority of them are in singleparent households If single-parent households, which are overwhelmingly headed by women, characterize the background of students in schools where African Americans predominate and if the social environments of African American schools inhibit educational excellence, then it seems reasonable to hypothesize that students from singleparent households somehow are producing social environments in schools with minority concentrations that prevent young minority members from fully realizing their capabilities THEORETICAL BACKGROUND In the mid-1960s, Coleman and his associates (1966) provided support for the view that schoolmates play an important part in shaping the education of young people Studies of the academic achievement of minority children generally have provided evidence that these children do better in racially mixed schools (See, for example, results of the studies of the influences of desegregation on achievement in Bankston & Caldas, 1996; Bridge, Judd, & Moock, 1979) Coleman attributed racial differences in achievement to socioeconomic differences between the races Because schools that are predominantly White tend to contain students from higher socioeconomic backgrounds, Coleman expected schools with majority White populations to be beneficial for minority children Studies, however, have found that the concentration of African American young people in schools has a negative effect on achievement, independent of socioeconomic status (Bankston & Caldas, 1996; Caldas & Bankston, 1997; Rumberger & Willms, 1992) …

Family structure, schoolmates, and racial inequalities in school achievement

Using multilevel modeling, this study examines the effect of African American concentration in Louisiana public schools on the academic achievement of African American and White students. The authors consider this question as they control for a variety of individual and school-level sociodemographic factors, including socioeconomic status and student race. African American concentration is defined as the percentage of the student body that is African American. Student achievement is a factor score derived from the three 10th-grade components of the Louisiana Graduation Exit Examination. The data are drawn from the 1990 test results of 42,000 students from 342 secondary schools. The study finds that, controlling for all variables, African American concentration still has a negative effect on student achievement. However, the percentage of minority students only begins to have a significant negative effect at relatively high levels of concentration. These findings suggest that to resegregate African America...

The Inequality of Separation: Racial Composition of Schools and Academic Achievement:

This study addresses the question of how the socioeconomic status (SES) of peers affects individual academic achievement. The authors examined this relationship while controlling for a variety of sociodemographic factors including a students own SES. They measured student SES using participation in the federal free/reduced price school lunch program as an indicator of poverty status and parental educational and occupational background as a measure of family social status. These measures are aggregated to the school-level to define the SES of the peer population. Student achievement is a factor score of the three tenth grade components of the Louisiana Graduation Exit Examination. The authors found that peer family social status does indeed have a significant and substantive independent effect on individual academic achievement only slightly less than an individuals own family social status. (authors)

Caldas Sj

Papers

The effect of school population socioeconomic status on individual student academic achievement.