Attitude of secondary school students toward education in relation to pre-matric scholarships in West Bengal, India
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.63697/jessp.2025.10063Keywords:
Pre-matric scholarship, Scholarship recipient & non-recipient, Attitude toward education, Gender, IndiaAbstract
Pre-matric scholarships are mainly reserved for students from disadvantaged communities, including scheduled castes (SC), scheduled tribes (ST), other backward classes (OBC), girls and minorities. This scholarship has been started by the Central and State Governments of India to raise the levels of participation, decrease the drop-out rate, motivate marginalized communities to pursue higher education, and promote equity. It helps marginalized communities to continue their education without additional economic burdens and ensures a better future. This study speaks about the attitude of secondary school students towards education and the relationship between the educational attitudes of students receiving pre-matric scholarships and those not receiving them. The author used an attitude measuring scale, named Attitude towards Education Scale for School Students (ATESSS), to assess students’ attitude towards education. The author assessed the attitude level of pre-matric scholarship recipients to see how much it supported and encouraged the recipients to continue and complete the educational process. A total of 319 students of 10th grade (class X) under the West Bengal Board of Secondary Education (WBBSE) were sampled through simple random sampling to achieve the study objectives. The collected data were tabulated in Microsoft Excel, and subsequent analysis was done in SPSS 22.0. Mean, standard deviation (SD), and t-values were calculated, and the significance of the results was tested at the 0.05 level of significance. No significant difference in attitude toward education was observed between recipients and non-recipients of the scholarship, though the scholarship showed a positive effect for rural students and male students, highlighting group-specific influences.
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