Reading Habits, Socioeconomic Conditions, Occupational Aspiration and Academic Achievement in Vietnamese Junior High School Students

Abstract

Reading practices play an important role in the learning process of students. Especially in a fast-changing world where knowledge about nature and society is in a constant state of flux, book reading helps students foster skills such as thinking, valuing, adaptability and creativity for sustainable development. This research study used a dataset of 1676 observations of junior high school students from Northern Vietnam to explore students’ academic achievement and its association with their reading passion, family socio economic condition, parental education and occupational aspiration. The empirical results show that higher grades in STEM-related subjects are predicted by reading interest (βReadbook = 0.425, p < 0.0001), with students who love reading books achieve higher score than those who take no interest in books. Remarkably, the education level of the mother strongly enhances academic performance, with β = 0.721 (p < 0.0001) in cases of mother having a university diploma or higher. Students coming from wealthy families are more likely to buy books whereas borrowing from the library is the main source of books for students who grow up in not-rich families. However, even among wealthy families, investment into buying books still rely more on personal interest, despite the aforementioned educational benefits of book reading, as evidenced by an over 7 percentage point disparity between the likelihood of purchasing books among wealthy-family students who took an interest in reading (45%) versus students of the same background who did not like to read (38.7%). The results present implications for education policy making with a vision towards United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal 4: Quality Education.

How Digital Natives Learn and Thrive in the Digital Age: Evidence from an Emerging Economy

“…Data also shows that mothers' education seems to have a higher association with the child than fathers' education. This result is relevant to the previous finding that the education level of the mother (having a university diploma or higher) strongly enhances the academic performance of students [59]. Given the circumstances of Vietnamese culture [50,52], it can be the reason that the mother more often stays at home and spends more time with a child than the father.…”

“…Schunk and Pajares [57] state that children more likely to achieve success in school have more time spent with their parents in school-related activities. In previous studies by Trung T., et al [58] and Le, et al [59], family and a scholarly culture at home have been proved to be essential for fostering children's reading habits; the parents are the role models, motivators, and facilitators for their children. Similar to previous studies, digitally skilled parents are believed to encourage their kids more frequently to explore the Internet or software such as PowerPoint to create their learning products [23].…”

A Bibliometric Review of Research on STEM Education in ASEAN: Science Mapping the Literature in Scopus Database, 2000 to 2019

“…STEM education is an interdisciplinary approach in the learning process, in which the principle academic concepts are integrated with real-world lessons. STEM education helps students apply their knowledge in science, technology, engineering and mathematics into specific contexts, helping to connect schools, communities, workplaces and global organizations, thereby developing STEM capabilities for competition in the new economy (Hsu & Fang, 2019;Le et al, 2019). The development of STEM education has a positive impact on academic achievement and the development of various skills for students (Batdi et al, 2019).…”

A Snapshot of Educational Research in 2019

“…(North and Longlands, 2019) [17]. Some universal studies include: the impact of high school reading habits on learning outcomes in science subjects [13]; different resource allocations for children are affected by their birth order (Tran et al, 2019) [26].…”