At the level of secondary school, student's self-concept about their academic capabilities plays an important role. The aims of the study were to examine the relationship between academic self-concept and academic achievement of secondary students and to compare the academic self-concept of male and female secondary students. Sample of the study were 615 secondary school students of both genders (Male 317, Female 298, aged 14-17 years). The sample was drawn from 15 secondary schools affiliated with CBSE board, session 2016-17 of Varanasi city, India. Academic achievement was measured by self-reported Cumulative Grade Point Average (CGPA) of the previous year. Academic self-concept was measured using Kample and Naik (2013) Academic Self Concept Scale (ASCS), which was composed of 57 items, distributed in 8 subscales namely Academic Ability, Academic Interests, Study, Examination, Academic Interaction, Academic Efforts, Curriculum, and Academic Future. The result of the study revealed that there was a positive relationship between academic self-concept and academic achievement and this relationship was stronger for female students (r = .28) than that of male students (r = .17). Moreover, gender differences in the academic self-concept of the students were also found. Female students had significantly higher academic self-concept than male students.

Parental involvement in the education of their children is a key function of child total functioning as well as their academic success. This paper review the research literature on the relationship among parenting practices such as parenting style, parents’ expectations, parental home and school involvement activities and students’ academic performance with the focus on elementary and middle school level. To conduct a comprehensive review on above relationship, researchers have used JSTOR data base and Google Scholar. The reviews of empirical researches indicate that different constructs of parental involvement play an important role in various ways. Several studies however indicate a decline in parental involvement during the middle or above school levels. Furthermore, the review indicates that authoritative parenting style is positively associated academic performance across all school level, although this finding is not consistent across ethnicity, culture and socioeconomic status. Parental home based and school based involvements have also been positively related to academic performance with some inconsistency. One the other hand parental expectations for their child educational attainment have the strongest impact on academic performance compared with other types of parental involvement constructs such as participation in school events, parent-child communication, and help in homework.

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The purpose of this paper is to describe the process of identification of criteria which measure the quality of research. Assessment of the quality of research is an important issue in the academic community. Time to time some criteria of quality of research have been given by different authors but an adequate or appropriate existing scale to assess the quality of research is still lacking. This paper presents a systematic process employed to develop a scale for assessing the quality of research. Reliability and validity of the tool have also been reported.