The influence of the ecological systems on grade seven academic achievers at a Junior Secondary Township School

Abstract

The study explores the influence of Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory on Grade seven learners’ academic achievements, particularly focusing on top achievers at a Junior Township Secondary School in the Gauteng Province, South Africa. Bronfenbrenner critiqued previous theories of child development that focused only on unfamiliar laboratory experiments and argued that child development cannot be limited to laboratory experiments as it is a complex system comprising of diverse relationships that a child has at multiple levels of their surrounding environment. Bronfenbrenner proposed a multidimensional frameworks theory for understanding child development in socio-political and social settings called the ecological systems theory, which has fundamentally affected the teaching and learning field. The ecological systems theory postulates that a child’s development is shaped by ecological systems namely, the microsystem, the mesosystem, the exosystem, the macrosystem and the chronosystem. Therefore, the stu