Children's Educational Attainment Research Articles

Adult children's educational attainment and the cognitive trajectories of older parents in South Korea

Little is known about whether and how adult children's educational resources are associated with aging parents' cognitive changes over time. Using a nationally representative survey from the Korean Longitudinal Study of Aging (2006–2014), the current study examined three related questions: whether adult children's education is independently associated with parents' latent trajectory classes of cognitive functioning; whether this association is explained by behavioral, psychological, and financial pathways; and whether the association varies by the gender of the child. Adult children's education is negatively associated with the unfavorable cognitive functioning trajectories of parents. Children's education predicts parents' higher perceived life satisfaction and upward financial transfers, which are some of the pathways through which children's education appears to prevent subsequent cognitive impairment in parents. Sons' education matters more for preventing the onset of dementia, and daughters' educational resources are linked to the prevention of cognitive decline among parents.

The Nature of Nurture: Using a Virtual-Parent Design to Test Parenting Effects on Children's Educational Attainment in Genotyped Families.

Research on environmental and genetic pathways to complex traits such as educational attainment (EA) is confounded by uncertainty over whether correlations reflect effects of transmitted parental genes, causal family environments, or some, possibly interactive, mixture of both. Thus, an aggregate of thousands of alleles associated with EA (a polygenic risk score; PRS) may tap parental behaviors and home environments promoting EA in the offspring. New methods for unpicking and determining these causal pathways are required. Here, we utilize the fact that parents pass, at random, 50% of their genome to a given offspring to create independent scores for the transmitted alleles (conventional EA PRS) and a parental score based on alleles not transmitted to the offspring (EA VP_PRS). The formal effect of non-transmitted alleles on offspring attainment was tested in 2,333 genotyped twins for whom high-quality measures of EA, assessed at age 17 years, were available, and whose parents were also genotyped. Four key findings were observed. First, the EA PRS and EA VP_PRS were empirically independent, validating the virtual-parent design. Second, in this family-based design, children's own EA PRS significantly predicted their EA (β = 0.15), ruling out stratification confounds as a cause of the association of attainment with the EA PRS. Third, parental EA PRS predicted the SES environment parents provided to offspring (β = 0.20), and parental SES and offspring EA were significantly associated (β = 0.33). This would suggest that the EA PRS is at least as strongly linked to social competence as it is to EA, leading to higher attained SES in parents and, therefore, a higher experienced SES for children. In a full structural equation model taking account of family genetic relatedness across multiple siblings the non-transmitted allele effects were estimated at similar values; but, in this more complex model, confidence intervals included zero. A test using the forthcoming EA3 PRS may clarify this outcome. The virtual-parent method may be applied to clarify causality in other phenotypes where observational evidence suggests parenting may moderate expression of other outcomes, for instance in psychiatry.

Maternal thyroid function and child educational attainment: prospective cohort study

ObjectiveTo determine if first trimester maternal thyroid dysfunction is a critical determinant of child scholastic performance and overall educational attainment.DesignProspective cohort study.SettingAvon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children cohort in...

Vision screening for correctable visual acuity deficits in school-age children and adolescents.

Vision screening for correctable visual acuity deficits in school-age children and adolescents.

The continuous treatment effect of an antipoverty program on children's educational attainment: Colombia's Familias en Accion

AbstractEducational attainment is an important element in the formation of human capital. Although many developing countries have made strong efforts to expand the coverage of education services, children in poor households still struggle to attend school on a regular basis. Human development conditional cash transfers (known as CCTs) have emerged in response to this situation in developing countries. While the effects of the CCTs are well known and widely documented, their effects in relation to educational attainment and school participation are still unclear. This paper looks empirically into the continuous treatment effects of participation length in Familias en Accion, a CCT program in Colombia. The paper focuses on the continuous treatment effects on school registration and educational attainment of participants in the program. Although initial results show a fuzzy relationship between the program outcomes and the participation length, the empirical results confirm the fact that a longer exposure to the antipoverty program led to higher school registration rates, accumulation of years of education, and lower child labor participation levels.

The association between childhood educational attainment and adult mental health and status: A thirty-year longitudinal follow up study

Background and objectivesPrior research and theories are predicated on the assumption that childhood education has a potentially significant effect on long-term adult mental health and status achievement, but there is little empirical data to support this view. Using a longitudinal birth cohort from birth to age 30, we investigated the association between childhood educational attainment and adult status achievement, including mental health in an American inner city population. Methods1820 infants (born between 1960 and 1965) were followed prospectively as part of the Collaborative Perinatal Project (CPP) and the Johns Hopkins Pathways to Adulthood Study, with multiple observations of development and an extensive adult interview. Childhood intelligence and educational ability were measured using the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC) and the Wide Range Achievement Test (WRAT) at age 7. Adult mental health was measured with the General Health Questionnaire (GHQ) when the infants reached age 27–33. During the adult follow up interview, status achievement data was collected including employment, personal income, and education. ResultsThere were significantly negative associations between age 7 WRAT scores and all the issues regarding adult mental health, positive associations between age 7 WRAT scores and years of school completed, personal income, and employment status. There were positive associations between childhood IQ and all status achievement variables, but no association recorded between childhood IQ and adult mental health. ConclusionsChildhood education was significantly associated with adult mental health and status achievement more than 25 years later. Low scores of WRAT significantly predict poor outcomes as an adult, both in terms of mental health and status achievement. The study findings have potentially strong implications for the enactment of policy changes around the world.

Mothers' Early Mind-Mindedness Predicts Educational Attainment in Socially and Economically Disadvantaged British Children.

Relations between mothers' mind-mindedness (appropriate and nonattuned mind-related comments) at 8months (N=206), and children's educational attainment at ages 7 (n=158) and 11 (n=156) were investigated in a British sample. Appropriate mind-related comments were positively correlated with reading and mathematics performance at both ages but only in the low-socioeconomic status (SES) group. Path analyses showed that in the low-SES group, appropriate mind-related comments directly predicted age-11 reading performance, with age-4 verbal ability mediating the relation between appropriate mind-related comments and age-7 reading. In contrast, maternal sensitivity and infant-mother attachment security did not predict children's educational attainment. These findings are discussed in terms of genetic and environmental contributions to reading and mathematics performance.

Parental alcohol consumption and adult children's educational attainment

This study analyses whether an excessive parental alcohol consumption during childhood can affect long run children's educational attainments. Using 19 waves of the Russia Longitudinal Monitoring Survey (RLMS), where individuals and their families are followed from childhood to adulthood, this study analyses parental alcohol consumption during childhood (between 1994 and 2001) and its relation with children's educational attainment about twelve years later (from 2005 to 2014). Panel estimations show that mother's excessive alcohol consumption during childhood is consistently negatively associated with children educational outcomes, as years of education, the highest education grade achieved and the probability of having a tertiary education degree, a finding that is robust to possible endogeneity issues. In particular, while moderate drinking is not an issue, an additional standard glass of vodka (15.57 g of pure alcohol) consumed by the mother per day, reduces years of education by almost one year (0.88), and by 5.8 percentage points (or about 27%) the probability of having a university degree. The study also explores the transmission mechanisms suggested by the literature, identifying a significant role for prenatal exposure to alcohol and, to a lesser extent, for intergenerational transmission of drinking habits.

Sex Differences in Intergenerational Income Transmission and Educational Attainment: Testing the Trivers-Willard Hypothesis.

From an evolutionary point of view, sex differences in intergenerational transmission of income may be influenced by the Trivers-Willard (T-W) effect: Low status parents should invest more in daughters, whereas high status parents are expected to invest more in sons. This bias in parental investment may result in status-dependent sex biased parental support for higher education and educational attainment and should therefore affect the level of intergenerational income transmission for the sons and daughters. We used the data from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study (WLS) to model the effect of parental financial investment on the child's income and educational attainment controlling for the number of siblings. The observed sex differences in intergenerational income transmission demonstrate that sons profited more from parental income and education in terms of their own income than daughters. Furthermore, we showed that fathers with a high socioeconomic index (SEI) invest more in their sons' education in terms of completed years of education and financial support during college. In contrast daughters of low SEI fathers completed more years of education and received more financial support than sons of low SEI fathers. However, the pattern in intergenerational income transmission might be better explained as a product of sociological factors and reproductive trade-offs in later life rather than as a consequence of the T-W effect.

Do parental attitudes toward and expectations for their children's education and future jobs matter for their children's school achievement?

The traditional discourse in the scholarship on cultural capital theory has focused on how exclusive participation in elite status culture by students from higher socioeconomic status families benefits their learning in schools, the effects of which are most evident in linguistic subject areas such as reading achievement. However, some scholars have argued that cultural capital is not restricted to elite status culture but could include parental familiarity with school evaluation standards and job market requirements, and that the effects could transcend languages to include performance domains with more objective evaluation that are susceptible to school influences (e.g. mathematics and science). The present study systematically examines this position using data involving 96,591 15‐year‐old students from 3602 schools in eight countries who participated in the Programme for International Student Assessment 2012. Results of three‐level hierarchical linear modelling showed positive relationships between seven cultural capital variables and student mathematics achievement. The cultural variables comprised: home educational resources; parental educational attainment and occupational status; parental expectations of their children's educational attainment, future career in mathematics and school; and parental valuing of mathematics. In particular, the three parental expectations variables had substantively larger effect sizes on student achievement than the other cultural capital variables. The results demonstrated that parental familiarity with school evaluation standards and future job requirements, especially as measured by parental expectations, may constitute cultural capital that privileges student mathematics achievement in schools.

Personality and the Intergenerational Transmission of Educational Attainment: Evidence from Germany.

Research based in the United States, with its relatively open educational system, has found that personality mediates the relationship between parents' and child's educational attainment and this mediational pattern is especially beneficial to students from less-educated households. Yet in highly structured, competitive educational systems, personality characteristics may not predict attainment or may be more or less consequential at different points in the educational career. We examine the salience of personality in the educational attainment process in the German educational system. Data come from a longitudinal sample of 682 17 to 25 year-olds (54% female) from the 2005 and 2015 German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP). Results show that adolescent personality traits-openness, neuroticism, and conscientiousness-are associated with educational attainment, but personality plays a negligible role in the intergenerational transmission of education. Personality is influential before the decision about the type of secondary degree that a student will pursue (during adolescence). After that turning point, when students have entered different pathways through the system, personality is less salient. Cross-national comparisons in a life course framework broaden the scope of current research on non-cognitive skills and processes of socioeconomic attainment, alerting the analyst to the importance of both institutional structures and the changing importance of these skills at different points in the life course.

Will my child ever go to a university? The link between school segregation practices and Norwegian parents’ expectations for their physically disabled child

How parents perceive their children's educational prospects can reveal a great deal about how their children will progress in the educational system. The paper examines the consequences of variations in inclusive education practices by investigating determinants of parents’ educational expectations for their child. All parents included in the study had children with physical disabilities in primary school (mainly cerebral palsy and spina bifida). The empirical material includes results from a survey (Net sample = 491), in combination with information merged from a range of official registers. The results showed that the more the child is segregated from ordinary classroom education, the lower parental expectations are for their children's educational attainments. Other factors also significantly influencing parents’ educational expectations include how parents’ view their child's school performance, as well as various measures of the severity of the child's physical disability. However, these secondary factors could not account for the empirically strong association between segregation practices and parental expectations. Parental expectations were also significantly related to parental income and education. The findings indicate that the expectations of parents with higher income and education are less affected by school segregation practices.

Child Development Accounts, parental savings, and parental educational expectations: A path model

Parents' expectations for their children's education, and efforts to foster suitably positive expectations, are worthy of policy attention. Previous research indicates that early saving for a child's postsecondary education can foster and sustain high parental expectations, yet little is known about the operative mechanisms. This study presents analyses from a randomized experiment with Child Development Accounts (CDAs), a policy to encourage early financial investments for education and to shape parents' expectations concerning their young children's educational goals. Our research provides key evidence on whether parental account holding for children's college (a) has a positive impact on parents' expectations for their children's educational attainment and (b) mediates the CDA's effect on their educational expectations at an early stage in their child's development. We employ data from the SEED for Oklahoma Kids (SEED OK) experiment, the first randomized social experiment to test universal and progressive CDAs. We conduct a path analysis and a supplemental analysis with marginal structural models (n=2160). We find that holding a college-savings account has a significant effect on parents' educational expectations for their children and that whether one holds an account mediates the effect of CDAs on such expectations. Findings suggest that CDAs may promote early parental financial investment and high expectations. Research and policy implications are discussed.

A Review of the Relationship between Parental Involvement and Students’ Academic Performance

Parental involvement in the education of their children is a key function of child total functioning as well as their academic success. This paper review the research literature on the relationship among parenting practices such as parenting style, parents’ expectations, parental home and school involvement activities and students’ academic performance with the focus on elementary and middle school level. To conduct a comprehensive review on above relationship, researchers have used JSTOR data base and Google Scholar. The reviews of empirical researches indicate that different constructs of parental involvement play an important role in various ways. Several studies however indicate a decline in parental involvement during the middle or above school levels. Furthermore, the review indicates that authoritative parenting style is positively associated academic performance across all school level, although this finding is not consistent across ethnicity, culture and socioeconomic status. Parental home based and school based involvements have also been positively related to academic performance with some inconsistency. One the other hand parental expectations for their child educational attainment have the strongest impact on academic performance compared with other types of parental involvement constructs such as participation in school events, parent-child communication, and help in homework.

Women's Inheritance Rights, Household Allocation, and Gender Bias

We analyze the impact of improved land inheritance rights for women in India on female empowerment by examining their educational attainment and the intergenerational effects of the reform. Using a difference-in-differences strategy, we find that the amendment to the Hindu Succession Act significantly increased education of women from landed households by 0.48 years. However, our results indicate a significant decrease in the educational attainment of children, especially boys of treated mothers. We attribute this decrease to treated mothers who are better educated and able to assess the higher opportunity cost of education for boys.

Opportunity or new poverty trap: Rural-urban education disparity and internal migration in China

Despite its rapid economic growth, China has never managed to reduce its rural-urban divide with its reforms and marketization of the economy. The huge gap between urban and rural education is embedded in the disparity in educational investment, children's educational attainment, school quality and the returns to education. Migrant children move with their parents to urban cities to pursue a better education. However, the Chinese household registration system (hukou system) limits migrant children's rights and access to basic education in the cities. Will migrant children benefit from a better-quality education in the cities, or will they continue to be constrained by their hukou registration? Will the large-scale internal rural-urban migration provide the opportunity to reduce rural-urban education inequality in China, or will it merely create a new education-poverty trap? Based on publicly available large-scale survey data (RUMiC), this paper applies logistic regression and survival analysis to illustrate the new education-poverty trap imposed on migrant children by the institutional constraints and hierarchies in children's education, created by the Chinese household registration system in Chinese cities.

Cohort at Risk: Long-Term Consequences of Conflict for Child School Achievement

We investigate the long-term effects of households' exposure to violent conflict on children's educational attainment in primary school, studying cognitive and non-cognitive skills as possible causal channels. Our identification strategy exploits the locality-level variation in the intensity of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the West Bank during the Second Intifada (2000–2005). We show that an increase in family experience of conflict has large negative long-term effects on the educational attainment of children measured by grade point averages. Impaired non-cognitive rather than cognitive skills are identified as channels through which exposure affects children's educational achievement.

Does death really make us equal? Educational attainment and resource compensation after paternal death in Finland

Attempts to explain the persistent importance of family background for children's educational attainment typically highlight the ways in which parents pass down educational, economic and social resources to their children. However, parental resources may also play a crucial role for preventing family crises from spiraling into cumulative disadvantage. To study such compensation processes, we examine the consequences of a father's death on children's educational trajectories, using a Finnish register-based sample of children born between 1982 and 1987. The results based on multilevel linear probability models both support and contradict our compensation hypothesis. Children who lost their father were not more likely to drop out of upper secondary school, as long as their surviving mother had high levels of socioeconomic resources. Similar compensation processes were visible in the case of entering polytechnic higher education. However, with regard to university attendance, bereavement noticeably reduced the traditional advantage of children with high-resource parents.

Equality of Opportunity and Achievement Gaps in the Israeli Education System

The Israeli government regularly uses the Educational Needs Index (ENI) to determine the resources needed to educate children growing up in less affluent environments. This paper investigates some results of this practice. By using data from children who were tested in nationwide exams at grades 5 and 8 we find that in Mathematics, at the school level, the negative correlation between the average test scores and the ENI is about 2.2 times higher in grade 8 than in grade 5 and that children from low index schools are more likely to improve their scores. OLS and quantile regressions of a value-added model on a subsample of the data emphasize the importance of parental education to children's educational attainment. It also shows a negative effect of the ENI on test scores. Our final conclusion is that the Israeli education policy fails to fully guarantee equality of opportunity to its students.

Manufacturing or Degree-Intensive Labor Markets: Where Do the Children of Non-College Graduates Earn More Degrees?

Manufacturing employment has declined since the 1970s, while the number of jobs requiring a college degree has risen. The shift has reshaped the environment in which many young people grow up and pursue their educations, potentially affecting the level of education they attain. This analysis uses the National Longitudinal Surveys of Youth to investigate the relationship between industrial composition and the educational attainment of children whose parents have only a high school education or less. The results show that the educational attainment of these youths is correlated with the region's industrial mix, though in ways that may seem somewhat surprising.