School Leadership, Climate, and Student Academic Achievement: The Role of Parental Involvement

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to examine the influence of leadership and organizational climate on the student academic achievement. The study also investigated the moderating influence of parental involvement on to the influence of school leadership and climate on the student academic achievement. This research was conducted in the public schools in the Emirates of Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (UAE). The study was designed to investigate research questions, as: 1). Do school leadership and climate make a change on the student academic achievement? 2). How does parental involvement contribute to interplay of school leadership and climate on student academic achievement? Based on the extant literature reviewed in this study, altogether thirteen hypotheses were framed including three mediation and three moderation hypotheses. The usable dataset in this study consisted of 304 teachers who were teaching in Grade 10, 11, and 12, at the time of the study in public schools of the Emirates of Abu Dhabi, who filled in the survey questionnaire for leadership, organizational climate, parental involvement, and student academic achievement. The demographic details of the sample in this study consisted of 137 male respondents (45.10%) and 167 female respondents (54.90%). Furthermore, the researcher used statistical software - the SPSS (Statistical Package of Social Sciences) version 24 and the AMOS (Analysis of a Moment Structures) version 24 - to empirically test the hypotheses of this study. The results obtained for the direct impact suggest that school organizational climate, transactional and transformational leadership positively and significantly influences the student academic achievements as both are positive and significant. However, the influence of the parental involvement on student academic achievement was not found to be significant. On the other hand, transformational leadership and school climate were found to positively and significantly influence the involvement the students’ parent, whereas the influence of the transactional leadership on the parental involvement of the students were found to be non-significant. Furthermore, the results of study indicate that parental involvement does not significantly mediate influence of leadership and school climate of the student academic achievement. As for the moderation analysis, the results of the study indicate that parental involvement positively and significantly moderate on to the influence of school climate and transformational leadership than transactional leadership on the student academic achievement. Previous studies in this domain are still in the developmental phase since not all studies were found to hae a moderating influence of parental involvement on transformational leadership and school organizational climate on the academic achievement of students. Therefore, the findings of this study hint at a significant scope for future researches in this domain. Overall, the study does point out that transactional leadership, transformational leadership and school climate than parental involvement directly influences student academic achievements. However, the parental involvement was found to moderate rather than mediate on the influence of transformational leadership and school organizational climate on students’ academic achievement. The results of the study were discussed under the light of the past researches in the field. This study advances theory and practice on student academic achievement. The findings of this study have key policy implications and they have been discussed in details. This study discusses limitations and future direction for research in the context of student academic achievement in the public schools in Emirates of Abu Dhabi in particular, and the Gulf Coordination Council (GCC) in general