Academic performance and other psychological, social and family factors in compulsory secondary education students in a multicultural context

Abstract

This work aims to transfer research on academic achievement in compulsory secondary education (CSE) students (12-18 years) from personal factors to others of a psychosocial or sociological type, in a Spanish center with a high level of immigration, which welcome students from twenty eight nationalities whose percentage is about 60%. A second objective was to develop a brief measurement instrument to predict academic achievement, being the main dependent variable the number of suspended subjects in all three course evaluations, finding an “optimal constellation of variables” which may be more likely to achieve better academic achievement. 317 students of Secondary Education were part of this research in a public center of Zaragoza (Aragon-Spain) who were given an “ad hoc” Family Settings, Psychosocial and Contextual Questionnaire” whose factorial analysis yielded three factors: Context Immigration, Family Settings and academic autobiographical history and study habits. Finally, we analyzed the differences found among students from different continents, trying to find sociocultural foundations and optimal conditions that can explain these differences. Further analysis allows us to glimpse a configuration of the most important variables that point to a hypothetical “academic success” in this educational field where there is great ethnic and cultural diversity.