Abstract:

This study aims to examine whether there is a significant relationship between the socioeconomic status of 7th grade students attending middle schools in Ağrı and their achievement in Turkish and Science and Technology courses. To this end, income and education levels of students’ parents, students’ gender, whether they attended a kindergarten, the number of siblings they have and whether they own a computer were identified as the socioeconomic variables. We then examined whether there were significant relationships between these variables and the grades students received from Turkish and Science courses. The study was conducted in the three middle schools in the central district of Ağrı province, during the Fall semester of the 2016-2017 academic year. A 13-item questionnaire was developed to identify students’ socioeconomic status and the achievement in Turkish and Science courses, and this questionnaire was administered to 396 seventh grade middle school students. Data collected via the questionnaire were analyzed using SPSS 16.0, and frequencies and percentages of student responses were calculated. To identify whether these responses were significantly related to the independent variables, we used Mann Whitney U, Kruskal Wallis H and correlation tests. Our analysis showed that overall, there was a strong relationship between socioeconomic status variables (independent variables) and grades for Turkish and Science courses, and these two groups of dependent and independent variables varied significantly.

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