What Factors Affect a Primary Student's Performance?

Abstract

This paper assesses the impact of gender, parents' education, preschool and medium of the class in influencing academic results with special attention given to written and oral tests. The data used for the analysis was gathered by the Chennai chapter of Asha, an NGO working to improve the education of rural and urban schools in Tamil Nadu. They conducted oral and written assessments in about 90 primary government schools in Tamil Nadu in the subjects of Math, English, and Tamil. The data collected from these schools comprised of student's age, height, weight, parent's educational qualification and details about their preschool. Apart from these, details about the school were gathered from a website hosted and maintained by the National University of Educational Planning and Administration (NUEPA). This included school details such as the number of students, teachers and their qualifications, the facilities, etc. The results show that the medium of the class, the type of preschool attended and the gender of a student have a correlation with the performance while factors such as body mass index, student-teacher ratio and school infrastructure quality have a small or negligible correlation with the performance