The roles of parenting practices and school attitudes in academic competence of Turkish high school students

Abstract

Primary aim of the present study was to study the variables associated with academic competence of the Turkish high school students. Specifically, (1) Whether dimensions of parenting practices, involvement, psychological autonomy granting and strictness/supervision, assessed with more Turkish culture sensitive scles, can be associated with academic competence. (2) Whether the determinants of academic achievement were the same for high and middle SES pupils alike. (3) Whether the inclusion of a school attitude measure among the potential predictors of academic competence would cause any difference to the importance of parental practices in academic competence of the high school students, were investigated. Parental and maternal practices, maternal employment, parental marital satisfaction, parental educational level, importance of education and school attitudes of the adolescents were proposed to be associated with the academic competence of the adolescents. A sample of 805 (440 girls and 365 boys) 9th and 11th grade students living with an intact family were included in the study. Among these students 228 girls and 223 boys were attending private schools and 212 girls and 132 boys were attending public schools in Istanbul. Demographic information questionnaire, maternal and paternal authoritativeness measures, importance of education questions, marital satisfaction scale and school attitudes measure was the instruments used for data collection. A series of reqression analyses indicated that importance of education asked in the negative, maternal psychological autonomy granting and parental strictness/supervision were associated with academic competence of high SES students, whereas only maternal strictness/supervision was associated with academic competence of middle SES students. When considered simultaneously with school attitude measures, parental practices lost their predictive power almost entirely and academic self-perception and motivation/self regulation emerged as the strongest predictors of academic comptetence across the two SES groups and genders. This suggested a mediating role of the school attitudes between parenting practices and academic competence of the students.