School Type, Parental Influence and Mathematics Attitudes-Achievement Relationship: A Quantile Analysis

Abstract

In this paper, we report the findings of a study on the impact of school category and parental assistance with homework on the mathematics attitude and achievement of senior secondary school students in Botswana. We adopted a quantile regression (QReg) method to analyse the relationship between attitudes and achievement, and also adopted a chi-square and independent sample t-test analyses. The advantage of the quantile regression (QReg) is that it establishes the relationship at the quantile (percentile) levels and does not require the parametric assumptions usually used in the Ordinary Least Square Regression (OReg). The findings showed that positive attitude significantly influenced the mathematics achievement of students across all the achievement quantiles of the QReg. The QReg also indicated that the school category had an effect across all quantiles except at the 5th percentile. Furthermore, the QReg indicated that at the 95th percentile, parental assistance with homework was very crucial in mathematics achievement. These findings implied that the OLS did not sufficiently capture the extreme tail characteristics of the mathematics achievement-attitude relationship. In particular, we observed that at the uppermost tail of mathematics achievements, parental assistance with homework explained better mathematics achievements than attitude. The authors concluded that the QReg method was an innovation to bridge the methodological gaps in previous similar studies. DOI: 10.5901/jesr.2014.v4n6p221