EFFECT OF SINGLE PARENTHOOD ON STUDENT’S ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE IN MATHEMATICS (ECONOMICS PROJECT TOPICS AND MATERIALS)
CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
BACKGROUND TO THE STUDY
There is widespread interest in improving the levels of mathematics achievement in schools. There is the economic benefits that this would bring by better preparing young people for the numeric demands for modern workplaces and raising the overall skills levels of the workforce, there are also social benefits tied to improving access for larger numbers of young people to post-school education and training opportunities and laying stronger foundations so skills for lifelong learning. The interest in raising levels of achievement has led as understanding how these factors operate to limit or enhance the achievement of different groups of students. The impact of different groups of students is important because groups of students. The impact on different groups of students is important because social differences in mathematics performance persist, despite inequalities in some other areas of school having declined. A study of trends in mathematics achievement over the three decades. A study of trends in mathematics achievement over the three decades 1996, in Australia shows that substantial social class differences persist (Afrassa & Keeves, 1999). Similar results have been reported on the US for the same period, with differences related to social groups (measured by parental education) remaining strong (National Center for Education Standards, 2000). The evidence is a reminder that a time when there are weakening social trends on some broad indicators of educational participation, such as school retention rates, social differences in student progress and academic outcomes continue.
The early literature on school effectiveness placed an emphasis on the ability and social backgrounds of students as factors that shape academic performance, and suggested that schools had little direct effect on student achievement. Coleman et al. (2006), for example, in a major study of US schools seemed to cast doubt on the possibility of improving school achievement through reforms to schools. They found that differences in school achievement of student peer, and concluded that ‘schools bring little influence to bear on a child’s achievement that is independent of his background and general social context. A later analysis of the same dataset by Jericks and his colleagues reached the same conclusion: our research suggests… that the character of a schools’ output depends largely on a single input, namely the characteristics of the entering children. Everything else..the school budget, its policies, the characteristics of the teachers.. is either secondary or completely irrelevant’ (Jericks et al., 2002).
Criticisms of this early work suggested that the modeling procedures employed did not take account of the hierarchical nature of the data, and was not able to separate out accurately school, student and classroom factors (e.g. Raudenbush & Willms, 1991) More recent school effectiveness research has used multi modeling techniques to account for the clustering effects of different types of data.
Types of single parent families are generally categorized by the sex of the custodial parent (mother-only or father-only families). Mother-only families include widows, divorced and separate women, and never-married mothers. In the case of divorce, mothers are usually given custody in the United States and other developed countries. In Italy, 1997, for example, 90 percent of children whose parents divorced went into the custody of their mothers. Since the vast majority of single parents are mothers, most of the research focuses on female-headed families. However, regardless of sex, single parents share similar problems and challenges (Grief 1985).
