He explained that as the parents get higher in the education ladder,
they are more equipped to handle stress as they get to experience in
schools and colleges. Some of the reasons for children of highly
educated parents doing really well in school compared with children
parents with lower levels of education as stated by Davis -Kean (2005)
that they are more likely to explicitly define higher levels of
education as desirable, encourage their children to do well in school,
and have higher expectations for their children’s academic achievement.
Studies
have been conducted in the area of students’ academic performance and
those studies analyse the number of factors that affect the academic
performance of students in schools, colleges and even at university
level. Findings have identified student’s effort, previous schooling,
parent's educational background, family income, self-motivation of
student, age of the student, learning preference and entry qualification
of student as important factors that have effect on student's academic
performance in different settings.
Poor performance of students these days has led to the question ‘what are the factors responsible for student’s academic performance?’ Chudi (2013) opined that parental involvement has a positive impact not only on student’s academic performance, but also on their overall behaviour and attitude about school work. Chudi posited that it is not the school that has failed; rather, it is partnership that has failed with schools taking on the responsibility that family and religion settings have ignored.
In the same vein, Beyer (1995) citing Hossler and Stage (1992) indicates that there is a positive relationship between the parent’s educational level and their children success in their academics. Ermisch and Francesconi (2001) obtained an interesting finding in their study where there is significant gradient between each parent’s education level and their child’s education achievement. On the contrary, Jeynasi (2002) as cited by Ali, Zubar, Fahad, Hamid and Awase (2013) concluded that socio-economic status is one of the many elements which determine students academic performance. Supporting this view is Graetz (1995) who pinpointed that the main source of educational imbalance among students and student’s academic success hinges very strongly on parent’s socio-economic standard.
An investigation conducted by Agus and Makhbul (2002) indicated that students from families of higher income levels perform better in their academic performance as compared with those who come from families of lower income brackets. Checchi (2000) also concluded that family income provides an incentive for better student’s performance; richer parents internalise this affect by investing more resources in the education of their children. However, it is believed that student’s academic performance is greatly affected by the standard and the educational institution students attend. .
Empirical Studies on Socio-Economic Status of Parents and Students’ Academic Performance.
Lots of studies have been carried out in an attempt to find out the relationship between parental involvement and student's academic performance. Few of these studies done in U.S. will be examined.
Daniel (2011) examined the association between parent-child communication, a form of parental involvement, and academic achievement by levels of parental education in 33 educational systems that participated in the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS). The results indicated a positive interaction of parent-child communication and parental education in 5 primary school systems. According to him, strength of the interaction strength varies across educational systems, but no clear pattern emerged for national income indicators. Only weak evidence of a stronger interaction for lower income and higher income inequality was found, which could suggest that students reap greater rewards of parent-child communication when faced with an adverse national economic environment.
Jeynes (2005), in his work entitled "The relationship between parental involvement and urban secondary school student achievement: A meta-analysis" undertook analysis to determine the extent at which parental involvement can affect educational outcomes of urban secondary school children. He did statistical analyses to determine the overall impact of parental involvement as well as specific components of parental involvement. Four different measures of educational outcomes are used. These measures include an overall measure of all components of academic achievement combined, grades, standardised tests, and other measures that generally included teacher rating scales and indices of academic attitudes and behaviours. The results indicated that the influence of parental involvement is significant for secondary school children. He found out that parental involvement as a whole affects to a large extent all the academic variables under study. The positive effects of parental involvement as found by Jeynes (2005) hold for both white and minority children.
