Most researchers focus on two or three family factors only in their study. However, family factors are complex and need to be examined systematically. As a result, our research aims to investigate different family factors together and explore their relationships with student academic achievement. Our main research question is: what is the relationship between these family-related factors, including family size, parents’ cohabitation status, mother’s education, father’s education, family educational support, and the quality of family relationships, and students’ academic achievement?
Our study used a dataset from two Portuguese schools, regarding the performance in the subject of Mathematics in secondary education. https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/ishandutta/student-performance-data-set?resource=download
Since we are interested in describing the relationship between six family-related factors and academic achievement, we chose to use a multiple regression model for our analysis. The coefficient of determination (R-squared) of the multiple regression model can show us how the overall model including all variables explains our outcome variable overall grade. In addition, 4 the regression coefficient of each variable inside the multiple regression model can tell us how each variable is associated with an overall grade, which answers our research question. The regression analysis is significant at 5% error margin (0.05 alpha level of significance).
Our multiple regression model analysis showed that students’ academic achievement doesn’t vary with their family size, parents’ cohabitation status, quality of family relationships, family educational support level, and father's education level respectively. However, the relationship between students’ academic achievement and family support depends on the student's family size. There’s also a significant difference in academic achievement between students whose mother received higher education and students whose mother didn’t. In other words, students’ academic achievement varies with their mother’s education level. Students whose mother received higher education have better academic performance.