Promoting Academic Achievement: The Role of Peers and Family in the Academic Engagement of African American Adolescents

While grades are frequently used as indicators of academic achievement, they provide little information about the processes that encourage academic success. Academic engagement, on the other hand, evaluates thoughts, motivations, and behaviors that predict achievement and helps elucidate achievement mechanisms. Understanding academic engagement can facilitate an examination of the forces influencing and hindering achievement and can guide researchers and educators in developing and evaluating effective interventions for increasing academic success. Grounded in ecological theory, this study attempts to understand the influence of family cohesion and peer risky behavior on academic engagement. First, the study explores how socializing with peers who engage in risky behaviors (e.g., sexual behaviors, truancy, or substance use) influences academic engagement and its components (i.e., interest in school, education utility value, and academic effort). Second, the study assesses whether family cohesion buffers the relationship between socializing with these peers and academic engagement. The findings from hierarchical linear regression indicate that socializing with peers who engage in risky behaviors has a significant, negative impact on academic engagement. Family cohesion also was significantly associated with academic engagement over and beyond the effects of risky peers. Implications for families, schools, communities, and programming are discussed.