and family income, is linked to GPA. In addition, the socioeconomic environment of the school to include school resources, teacher-pupil ratio, teacher-experience, and numbers of teachers with advanced degrees, also affected student GPA. Teacher experience was positively correlated with GPA but advanced teacher degrees was negatively linked with GPA. Thus family and school variables may be related to student motivation and academic success.
Oettinger (2000) studied the relationship between another family variable, sibling similarity, and high school graduation outcomes. Family values may affect motivation to graduate in older siblings, which would spill over to younger siblings. It may also be that the younger sibling learns from the older sibling through the role model effect. For this study data was from sibling pairs from a Longitudinal Survey of youth, which began in 1979 and included 12,686 American youths ages 14 years to 21 years. Findings showed that older sibling achievement has
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