Family environment, educational aspirations, and academic achievement in two cultural settings

This study tested a four-step model consisting of family background, perceived parental support and demandingness, educational aspirations, and academic achievement. The model was estimated on data collected from eighth graders (N = 686) growing up in two cultural settings: transition to modernity (Israeli Arabs) and Western (Israeli Jews). LISREL analyses performed separately for the four ethnicity-by-gender groups showed good fit of the model and supported the predicted differences in the links between the latent variables across ethnicity and gender. Specifically, family background had direct and indirect effects on the academic achievement of Arab but not Jewish adolescents. The indirect family background-academic achievement path showed gender differences only for the Arab adolescents via educational aspirations for girls and parental demandingness for boys, and parental demandingness was directly related to academic achievement of Arab boys and Jewish adolescents. Discussion explained ethnic and gender differences in terms of demographic and sociocultural conditions.