Factors Influencing the Academic Achievement of Secondary School Students: A Structural Equation Model

Abstract

One of the major reasons expounding the persisting decline in students’ academic achievement and high drop-out rate at the secondary education level in Mauritius, despite the implementation of several educational reforms including the current ‘Nine Years Continuous Basic Education’ (NYCBE), is that reforms are often developed using a top-down approach with limited grounding into the voices of stakeholders. It is in this perspective that this study, underpinned by the ‘general system’ theory, uses a two-phases ‘sequential exploratory mixed methodology’ to capture the voices of different stakeholders to develop a Structural Equation Model (SEM) that showcases the correlations between key contextualised factors and students’ academic achievements. The first phase, with a qualitative approach, identified the contextualised factors affecting students’ academic achievement in Mauritius, by analysing data derived from ‘Focus Group Discussions involving 16 participants, representatives of different educational stakeholders. The second phase, with a quantitative approach, developed a SEM using data collected from 600 students, captured through a survey questionnaire. The generated SEM, with a good fit indices, did not only depict greater impacts of school leadership, followed by student factor, tuition teacher factor, school teacher factor and socio-economic factor respectively on the academic achievements of secondary students, but also showcased the mediated effects between the factors, advocating for a holistic approach to improve school effectiveness in Mauritius. This study provides key information informing policy makers, educational specialists, and school administrative on the way forward towards improved school effectiveness.