How Family Background Influences Student Achievement

A key goal of education is to ensure that every student has a chance to excel, both in school and in life. Increasingly, children’s success in school determines their success as adults, determining whether and where they go to college, what professions they enter and how much they can earn. School performance in primary and secondary school does not depend on a student’s mental and physical abilities alone, other factors also have an important role. Studies carried out in a wide variety of countries demonstrate that social and family background greatly influence school performance. In the study I try to establish whether there is significant correlation between social / family background and a student’s school performance. Furthermore, I focus on how a student is upbringing influences the association between school performance and family and social background. In the paper I examine three populations of Slovene students – third/fourth graders and seventh/eighth graders in primary school, and students in the final year of secondary school. Using the cluster method, all three populations were assigned to five different groups according to their achievement score on mathematics and science tests. The data used for the analysis was gathered in 1995 within the international study TIMSS 1995.