Relationship between ordinal position and academic achievement among adolescents: A study

Abstract

Ordinal position refers to the actual order in which a child is born; that is first, second, third … sixth, seventh and so on. Children of a family though sharing the same genetic pools from both of their parents and also raised in a similar environment attain different capabilities in their adult lives. There has been some research in the past to understand why such differences occur. However, these researches have either not considered academic achievement – which in the modern competitive world is often considered as one of the key criterion to judge one’s total potential and capability – as one of their parameters of study or the final conclusions so drawn fail to clearly define the relationship between ordinal position and academic achievement. In this paper an attempt has been made to examine a relationship between the ordinal position and academic achievement. For this purpose, a sample of 50 children was selected which was limited to the young adolescents (age 13-16 years). The results do not reveal a clear relationship between the ordinal position and academic achievement; however, these results cannot be generalized because the study has been conducted on a small sample. Notwithstanding this, it is hoped that the results from this pilot study will help to broaden the research by also including other groups.