The Influence of Study Attitude on the Academic Achievement of Selected Secondary Schools Students of Five Districts of Andhra Pradesh with Reference to the Locality of the School

Abstract

In this modern era urbanization is growing very fast and the villagers are migrating to the cities and settling down. However in India, particularly in Andhra Pradesh more than 75% of the population is residing in the rural areas. Students studying in the village schools are different from the students studying in the urban environment. Achievement has been defined as, "A task oriented behavior that allows the individual's performance to be evaluated according to some internally or externally imposed criterion, that involves the individual in competing with others, or that otherwise involves some standard of excellence” (Sabir, 1999).The sample consists of 1407 students from  secondary schools located in Andhra Pradesh, India. The descriptive statistics such as frequency, percentages, mean and standard deviation were used to analyze the results. Other than that, inferential statistic such as t-test was used to analyze the difference between the study attitude and academic achievement of rural and urban students. Meanwhile, Pearson correlations were used at significant level 0.05 to analyze the relationship between study attitude   and academic achievement of the project sample.

The overall analysis of study attitude of Secondary School Students, maximum percentage of them (75.05%) exhibited average level of study attitude.  In this background comparative study was carried out among urban and rural students. The research findings showed that all three percentage levels of study attitude of rural students   in terms of their academic achievement, they remain lower than urban students. When relationship between study attitude and academic achievement were statistically analyzed, rural students recorded non significant relationship with the aforementioned variables in contrast to urban that showed significant relationship.  Pearson correlations analysis showed that there were significant relation between dimension of study attitude and the academic achievement of urban and rural students. Therefore, suggestions were offered to improve the rural student's study attitude and their academic achievement.