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This paper seeks to examine the roles of personality, vocational interests, academic achievement and some socio‐cultural factors in educational aspirations of secondary school adolescents in southwestern Nigeria.

A survey research design was adopted. The sample comprised 430 (males = 220, females = 210) secondary school students. Data personality, vocational interests, academic achievement, socio‐cultural factors and educational aspiration were obtained from the students. Hierarchical multiple regression analysis was used to analyse the data.

The paper finds that specific personality, interest dimensions, academic achievement, socio‐economic status and demands from extended family were significantly related to the students' educational aspirations.

The cross‐sectional correlational research design does not permit cause‐and‐effect inferences to be made. Use of a single‐item survey to assess educational aspirations may limit the results. Future research may add more items to assess educational aspiration.

The adolescents' personality, vocational interests, academic achievement and socio‐cultural factors should be identified and included in the career counselling process by counselling psychologists.

This research provides basis for the need to consider personality, interests and socio‐cultural factors in addition to cognitive attainment when explaining the adolescents' educational aspirations.

This study examines the educational aspirations of immigrant students, who are descendants of eight different immigrant communities in Germany. First, the article shows that compared to native German students, the educational aspirations of students with migration origin vary substantially. Challenging previous narratives of immigrant optimism and information deficit, the article suggests that the students of Turkish origin develop a conscious appraisal of obtaining an academic high-school qualification (AHSQ), even if they realize they will not be able to receive one by the end of the high-school. The study also shows that the duration of their stay in Germany plays a significant role in attenuating the high educational aspirations of most immigrant communities. However, Turkish students constitute an exception to this finding as they maintain high idealistic aspirations from first- to third-generation. The return migrant students from the former Soviet Union are the only group who report high educational aspirations, when asked about both their idealistic and realistic aspirations. Finally, the findings indicate that the position of the particular immigrant groups within the German social status hierarchy is a strong determinant of the educational aspirations of immigrant students and their parents.

An empirical study of the aspirations of Israeli Arab high school students shows that in comparison with the low educational and occupational attainments of their predecessors, Israeli Arab high school students hold unrealistic, highly optimistic views regarding their future educational and occupational destinations, irrespective of their social origins. These findings contradict extant sociological perspectives, which view the gap between aspirations and destinations as improbable, and to the extent that this gap exists, as an expression of naiveté, ignorance, or non-rationality. The puzzling gaps between aspirations and destinations among Israeli Arab adolescents led to a new model of the production of minority aspirations. This model suggests that high aspirations among minority youth are produced by converging expectations of local community leaders, school personnel, and parents, who actively heat up future aspirations amongst young cohorts. The paper concludes with proposals for comparative studies of minority aspirations in different societies.

There has been limited research to date that takes account of marginalized migrants’ educational aspirations in the Global South using a human development lens. There is thus a need to consider where aspirations and education fit into processes of development among and for youth, particularly in the South-to-South migration context. This chapter conceptualizes the formation of educational aspirations among marginalized migrant youth. The emphasis is on higher education, with a focus on educational aspirations, because of the importance of higher education for both intrinsic and instrumental development of individuals in equipping them for multiple futures. Using the human development and capability lens for analysis, we argue that to understand educational aspirations we need to take account of material resources as well as the interaction between individual agency and structural conditions. The chapter argues that the formation of higher educational aspirations is complex, as is the environment that shapes them. Such a complexity requires an in-depth and comprehensive analysis to take account of the lived realities of marginalized groups.

This study examines the relative influence of adolescent job characteristics upon girls’ and boys’ educational and occupational aspirations.

Using data from the 2010 Monitoring the Future Project, a nationally representative sample of high school seniors in the United States, descriptive statistics and multivariate analyses are used to examine variations in girls’ and boys’ aspirations. The analyses are conducted with a life-course theoretical framework.

Overall, girls are shown to have greater aspirations for attaining a college degree and a professional career, as compared to boys. However, the relationship between teenagers’ job characteristics and adult statuses is shown to be substantially stronger among boys. For both sexes, work hours are associated with lower aspirations, yet the particular type of job responsibilities, such as office work, increased the aspirations for both females and males.

The findings strongly support the contention that the development of educational and occupational aspirations is readily influenced by the context of work experiences during the teen years. Given the variations shown in the aspirations and work experiences of adolescent girls and boys, future researcher should attempt to more precisely examine the work experiences of teens and discern how these may affect other developmental processes.

This study extends the current research literature by examining the distinct differences in the work experiences of adolescent girls and boys and how those experiences potentially influence the development of educational and occupational goals.

This paper examines the relationship between the reference group, influences of parents, teachers and peers, and the vocational aspirations of secondary school students, taking account of differences in sex, social class, mental ability and home environment. It uses a sample of 704 student, of ages 16 and 17 years, drawn from four metropolitan senior high schools in Western Australia. Regression analysis indicates that approximately two‐thirds of the variance in boys' vocational aspirations, and half the variance in girls' vocational aspirations, is accounted for by a model which uses as predictors social class, mental ability, home environment, teacher and parent expectations and peer aspirations. Further analysis, using step‐wise techniques, shows that the influences of parents and teachers—in that order—are most important, as intervening variables, between the contextual variables of social class, mental ability and home environment, and the dependent variable of aspirations.

The purpose of this study is to explore the mediating role of workplace attitudes: professional identity and career aspirations between perceptions of principals’ authentic leadership and teacher behaviors: intent to leave, organizational citizenship behavior, counterproductive work behavior, lateness and intention to leave among teachers.

The sample was composed of 605 teachers, randomly selected, nested in 41 Israeli elementary, junior high and high schools. Data analysis was based on multi-level structural equations.

The findings indicated that the more the school was perceived by the teachers as having an authentic leader, the professional identity of the teachers was higher and was negatively associated with counterproductive work behavior toward colleagues in the school, while the teachers’ career aspirations were higher and negatively associated with counterproductive work behavior toward the organization.

This study shows the importance of teachers’ individual and collective perceptions and their impacts on teacher behaviors. The practical contribution may include encouraging principals to promote high standards of authentic leadership, to raise teachers’ professional identity and their career aspirations and reduce teachers’ counterproductive work behavior and intention to leave.

In 2003, Howard surveyed African Americans with emphasis on academic identities and college aspirations. This investigator interviewed African-American students at two urban high schools to gain insight relative to their college ambitions, educational capabilities, and academic identities. According to the students interviewed one specific area that affected their academic identity and college aspirations was perceived racism and discrimination, including counselors’ and teachers’ perception of their intelligence, unfair placement in special needs courses, and teachers’ attitude and behavior toward students (Howard, 2003).

Generally, theory and research investigating the effectiveness of mentoring has offered little resounding evidence to attest to mentoring programmes being a strategic initiative that make a real difference in reducing the educational inequities many minority students endure. In contrast to this existing research base, the Australian Indigenous Mentoring Experience (AIME) has often been cited as one of the most successful mentoring initiatives within Australia. It is the purpose of this chapter to examine how AIME may impact on the educational aspirations and school self-concept of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students.

A series of multi-group analyses were centred around Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) and structural equation modelling techniques that sought not only to explore the psychometric validity of the measures utilized within this study, but also to identify how the measures may be related after accounting for background variables (e.g. gender, parental education).

The results found that the measures utilized held strong psychometric properties allowing an increased level of confidence in the measures used and the conclusion that may be drawn from their use in analyses. Overall, the results suggested that AIME is an effective tool for increasing not only the educational aspirations of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students but also their levels (and utility) of School Self-concept and School Enjoyment.

The implications suggest that not only is AIME an essential tool for closing the educational gap between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander and non-Aboriginal students, but also our understanding of mentoring must be extended well beyond simplistic notions of role-modelling.

This chapter considers adolescents' migration aspirations in Kyrgyzstan. The discussion is based on the data obtained from 14 semi-structured interviews with adolescents as part of a qualitative study devoted to changes and continuities in biographic projecting across three generations. The study reveals the tendency towards having aspirations to move abroad for studies, work and/or life. Thus, the objective of this chapter is to consider the adolescents' motivation and to trace opportunities and challenges which may promote or hinder the realisation of individuals' migration projects. Special attention is paid to the role of an adolescent's family in this process. Adolescents' aspirations oriented towards future life in foreign countries are analysed with the help of two theoretical concepts – the concept of intergenerational solidarity and the concept of individualisation.

The analysis has shown that in Kyrgyzstan, adolescents' plans concerning going abroad are often framed by their extended families' interests and expectations. Adolescents' migration aspirations become a collective project of every family member for the sake of the family's future well-being. Parental expectation of care and support in their older age is one of the main limitations on adolescents' aspirations to move abroad. Those adolescents whose migration aspirations do not correspond with parental expectations may experience strong ambivalence, when they face the conflict between their individualised biographic projects oriented towards promising global opportunities and intergenerational solidarity norms.