ROLE OF PERCIEVED PARENTAL SCHOOL INVOLVEMENT AND FAMILY RELATIONS IN ACADEMIC ACHIEVEMENT OF CHILDREN

Abstract

The study was aimed at exploring the role of perceived parental school involvement and family relations in academic achievement of children of class 61h to 81h. The research also explored the effect of different variables i. e., gender, family size, mother's employment status and tuition on perceived parental school involvement and family relations. For this pUllJose, two scales i.e. , Student: Thinking about my homework (Hoover-Dempsey & Sandler, 2005) and Index of Family Relations (Deeba, 2001) were selected. The study was completed in tvvo parts. Part I dealt with the translation and cross language validation of Perceived Parental School Involvement scale. Results of part I showed that the scale is satisfactorily cross language validated with alpha coefficients ranging from .567 to .841.Part II was based on main study. Both scales were administered on a sample of 119 students (boys= 60; girls= 59) of English and Urdu medium schools. Regression analysis showed that perceived parental school involvement and family relations sign{ficant~)J contribute to academic achievement of children. The .findings revealed that the students of English medium schools have healthier family relations and high perceived parental school involvement. The effect ofd(fferent demographic variables was also observed. Children with small families have sign(ficantly healthier fam ily relations as compared to the children of large families. Moreover, the children of employed mothers significantly perceived more parental school involvement as compared to the children of unemployed mothers. However, differences of gender and tuition remained non sign(/icant.