Abstract

• Academic aspiration has been a prominent topic within education for many years. Academic aspirations are related to long term academic outcomes, such as academic achievement (graduation from high school, college enrollment and completion) (Redd, Brooks & McGarvey, 2001). The primary purpose of this study was to investigate the academic aspiration (especially in science) of high school students. Then, to investigate whether there would be significant differences between gender, school and district on Grade 10 students’ academic aspiration were next interest. Descriptive survey research method and quantitative data analysis were used in this study. As a research instruments, Student Science Aspirations Questionnaire (SSAQ) developed by Dewitt et al., (2010) was applied. Student Science Aspirations Questionnaire (SSAQ) consisted of seven subscales with 34 items of 5-point Likert scale. The internal consistency coefficient (Cronbach’s Alpha) of academic aspiration was 0.906. A total of 820 Grade 10 students from four Government Schools and eight Privat+e Schools in four districts of Yangon Region participated in this study. The data collection was completed in the second week of January, 2016. In the analysis of data, descriptive statistics, independent sample t-test, Post Hoc test and one-way ANOVA were used in this study. The result of this study revealed that significant differences existed in the students’ academic aspiration by gender. But, significant differences in academic aspiration were not found to be by school and district.