Parental Incentive and Student’s Performance in SAEB 2015 Portuguese Language Evaluation: Does Parental Incentive Compensate for Mean Differences by Sex?

Abstract

Since the 1960s, the sociology of education has inequalities as one of its central themes. From the 1980s, studies on school effectiveness analyzed a set of school characteristics that are associated with students learning. At the same time, emerges another study field that analyzes the relationships between family and school pointing out differences in the type of family incentive to schooling [1,2,3]. However, there is still a gap in Brazilian national production relating to student achievement in standardized national evaluations to an indicator that brings together parenting practices to monitor children’s schooling. Thus, the objective in this essay is to create a parental incentive indicator based on the data from SAEB 2015, applied to the 9th grade, and to associate it with the performance of municipal and state school students at SAEB 2015 Portuguese Language Evaluation. The results state that the presence of the high parental incentive increases the students' average results, however, the presence of the high parental incentive does not compensate for the mean differences when compared with the student's gender variable. In other words, regardless of the degree of parental incentive received, within the same socioeconomic level group, girls perform better in the SAEB 2015 Portuguese Language Evaluation than boys.