Family structure and academic skills among Finnish adolescents

Abstract

This study investigated whether family structure accounts for adolescent academic performance in Finland in the analysis. The thirteen-to fourteen-year-old (grade 8) students" (N=171) literacy skills were measured and their mathematical performance was tested. Information about family structure was gathered via a questionnaire sent to their homes. The findings of the study revealed that adolescents from other than two-parent intact families performed particularly well in regard to literacy skills. There were no gender differences with respect to either skill. The adolescents came from families of each type of structure, across all skill levels, suggesting that adolescent learning outcomes are not determined by diversity in family structure.A family is a socio-cultural unit that intermediates values (Minick et al. 1993;Schwartz, 1996) and learning-related motivation (Allen et al. forms a pathway to learning central academic skills as well.Moreover, there is a substantial body of research on the interplay between an individual"s inherited personal qualities and their surrounding factors (Plomin 1994).

Dynamics between student vs. teacher perceptions of mathematics task-orientation and mathematics performance among adolescents

“…Gender differences may be somewhat culturally related and also dependent on the measures employed in each study. However, previous literature concerning Finnish girls have been shown to perform consistently better in language-related skills than Finnish boys (Sulkunen, 2013), whereas no such stability in the difference exists mathematics skills (Kyttälä & Björn, 2013;Björn & Kyttälä, 2011). Based on our earlier findings of this particular data on mathematics anxiety, the boys were expected to rate their mathematics task-orientation as more positive than the girls (see, Kyttälä & Björn, 2010).…”