A structural model of attitudes towards school subjects, academic aspiration and achievement

The aims of this study were to test the structure of attitudes to school subjects and to test the causal relationship between attitudes, level of aspiration (goal) and achievement with SEM procedures. A total of 280 high school students participated in the study. Items measuring attitude towards each subject matter clustered around one factor indicating that each school subject is unique, but related, to other subjects. These distinct, but related, factors seemed to be underlined by a higher-order construct: `attitudes to school’. The structural analysis revealed that `attitudes to school’ infl uence achievement, but only indirectly. Level of aspiration had signi® cant direct effect on achievement and mediated between `attitudes’ and achievement.