Abstract
The impact of social economic status (SES) on children's academic outcomes has been well documented. However, the mechanisms underlying this relationship remain poorly understood. Furthermore, the process by which SES relates to academic achievement needs to be studied separately for boys and girls. Using a sample of 598 Chinese children (299 boys, 299 girls) in grades 4 to 6 and their parents, this study examined the process of how family SES, specifically family income and parental education, indirectly relates to children's reading achievement through parental expectation and parental involvement and whether this process differs between boys and girls. The results revealed that parental expectation and specific parental involvement behaviors played critical mediating roles between family SES and reading achievement. Moreover, the exact nature of these links differed by the gender of children. For boys, both the effect of parental education and the effect of family income were partially mediated by parental expectation and parent-child communication orderly. For girls, the effect of parental education was partially mediated by three separate pathways: (1) home monitoring; (2) parent-child communication; and (3) parental expectation followed by parent-child communication, while the effect of family income was fully mediated by parent-child communication. These findings suggest a process through which SES factors are related to children's academic development and identify a context under which these associations may differ. The practical implications of these findings are discussed, along with possible future research directions.
Highlights
Social economic status (SES) is the measurement of the social status and economic status of an individual
In this study, we focused on children’s reading achievement, because reading achievement is a prerequisite for all other school success (Farkas, 1996), and because it has been suggested that distinct mediating mechanisms operate in the association between family SES and different academic outcomes (Eamon, 2002), and reading achievement has been reported to be more strongly affected by family factors than other subject areas, such as mathematics (Mercy and Steelman, 1982; Marjoribanks, 1989)
The study proposed a model to examine the process of how family SES, parental education and family income, relates to reading achievement among Chinese students through parental expectation and parental involvement and to examine whether this process differs between boys and girls
Summary
Social economic status (SES) is the measurement of the social status and economic status of an individual. Using family income and parental education to create a combined SES indicator and using the Peabody Individual Achievement test as the academic achievement indicator (which provides an assessment of achievement in five areas: mathematics, reading recognition, reading comprehension, spelling, and general information), Carlson et al (1999) found that the relationship between SES and academic performance was r = 0.34 in elementary school students in grades 1–3. In a more recent meta-analysis of 201 studies, the relationship between SES and reading was r = 0.32, and the relationship between SES and math was r = 0.35 (Sirin, 2005). This relationship has been found in China. According to the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2012 results, 15.1% of differences in mathematics performance and 15.6% of differences in reading performance among Chinese students (from Shanghai) were explained by disparities in students’ SES, approximately the same as Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) average levels, 14.8 and 13.1%, respectively
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