Importance Of Family And Academic Achievement

Steinberg (2013) clearly defines educational achievement in one of the three ways: school performance which refers to the grades that the students earn in school, academic achievement which attributes to the students’ performance on their standardised tests or educational attainment which illustrates the number of years of schooling the students complete (p.397). There are many factors that contribute to the students’ academic success, one of them is a family. As family is a primary source of informal education for a child, it can be considered that family unit has a tremendous role in affecting child’s academic achievement (Sumari, Hussin & Siraj, 2010). Family can be considered as a unit which consists of individuals who are related by blood, marriage or adoption (Franklin, 1990-1991). The importance of family as a social institution that is crucial for the society and individual’s wellbeing is evidenced in The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Right 1966. It stated “The widest possible protection and assistance should be accorded to the family, which is the natural and fundamental group of the society”.

Urie Bronfenbrenner’s famous bioecological model conceptualises the environment as a set of nested structures – microsystem, mesosystem, exosystem macrosystem and chronosystem in which each structure poses a distinct level of influence on children’s development. The child directly participates in the activities, roles and relationships in the microsystem which involves interaction with family, peers, teachers, and in the places such as schools, church, neighbourhood play area and sports club. This participation significantly has direct influence on children’s life (Bronfenbrenner, 1979). Based on...

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...rectly, impact their children value of the importance of achievement in schooling and education.

Family factor such as parental expectation seems to have an enormous impact on children’s educational achievement. As illustrated by Bronfenbrenner’s bioecological model, family has a direct influence on children’s life. Schools should encourage parents to become actively involved in their children’s education by promoting the importance of being supportive and having high expectations on their children’s educational attainment. Government, through its policy should provide monetary support to the impoverished family to reduce poverty and increase their socioeconomic status as from the research, it is evidenced that parents with higher socioeconomic status hold higher expectation towards their children’s academic achievement which lead to academic success in schools.