Impact of family climate on the academic achievement of senior secondary students

The world is becoming more and more competitive and quality of performance is the key factor for personal progress. Excellence particularly, in academics and generally in all other areas has been seen as an important aspect. Parents desire that their children climb the ladder of performance to as high level as possible. This desire of a high level of achievement puts a lot of pressure on students, teachers, institutions and the educational system itself in general. In fact it appears as if the whole system of education revolves around academic achievement of the students, though various other outcomes are also expected from the system. Thus, a lot of time and efforts of the schools are utilized in helping students to achieve better in their scholastic endeavors. Thus the present study aims at investigating the impact of family climate on the academic achievement of senior secondary students. The sample consists of 865 male and female respondents of science and arts stream. Family Environment Scale (FES) constructed by Bhatia and Chadha in the year 1993 was used for this study. The findings of the research study depicts the influence of only 2 dimensions of FC (out of 8 dimensions of FC) on students’ academic achievement. Results, clearly shows that the t-value is found to be highly significant at.01 level of confidence. This clearly indicates that two dimensions of FC i.e., Active recreational orientation (F6) & independence (F5) contribute in determining the academic achievement of both science and arts stream students. Again the value of R-square from the table shows that F6 & F5 plays a determining role in the academic achievement of the total sample. The beta value from the table clearly depicts that it is positively significant in case of both F6 (.10738**) & F5 (.08521**) which enables us to conclude that higher the F6 & F5 higher will be their academic achievement.