The relations between family contextual factors and academic achievement: Second-order meta-analysis

Abstract

The present study is an attempt to give a holistic and bigger picture of the relations between family contextual factors and academic achievement by employing second-order meta-analysis to synthesize results from first-order meta-analyses. Thirteen first-order meta-analyses included in this study represent more than one thousand culturally diverse studies and cover 70 years of scholarship from 1950 to 2020. The findings revealed that the strength of the relationship between family contextual factors and achievement was at a medium level. The moderator analyses showed that family SES represented a stronger relationship with student achievement than parental behaviors such as parental involvement or expectations. We found no significant differences among other moderators, such as the academic subject domain, culture, quality assessment, report types, and year range.