Eventual Educational Attainment Research Articles

An exploration of placement-related psychosocial influences on school engagement among adolescents in foster care

There is ample evidence that experiencing foster care in childhood often predicts grim outcomes in adulthood, including under-education and resulting poverty and dysfunction. However, little is known about the exact mechanisms through which foster care corrodes academic trajectories, specifically. The current study uses a nationally representative sample of adolescent foster youth (i.e., NSCAW II) to test a model of the influences of placement-related factors on school engagement – namely, foster youth’s perceptions of security in their foster placements, their reports of education-specific involvement by foster caregivers, and the mediating potential of adolescents’ expectations for their future. Results indicate that adolescents’ feelings of “placement security” were linked to their future expectations of positive life outcomes and, ultimately, school engagement. Results also suggest that while educational involvement by foster caregivers was not important for future expectations or social school engagement, it may be related to the more explicitly cognitive aspects of school engagement (i.e., assignment completion, effort, etc.). These findings offer insight into relations between foster care-specific factors and school engagement – a known predictor of academic achievement and eventual educational attainment. Implications for future research and practice are discussed.

Parents' educational beliefs and children's early academics: Examining the role of SES

In this study, associations between parents' educational beliefs and growth in their children's kindergarten achievement were examined to determine whether relations differed across levels of socioeconomic status (SES) among contemporary kindergarten students, with a particular focus on whether this moderation effect was mediated by parental enrichment practices. Participants included 13,399 children drawn from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 2010–11 (ECLS-K:2011) and their parents. Educational beliefs included parents' beliefs about the skills necessary for a child entering kindergarten and parents' expectations for their children's eventual educational attainment. SES was operationalized as both income status and parental educational attainment, and enrichment was measured as educationally-related practices in the home and extracurricular activities. Educational beliefs were significantly and positively related to achievement, such that children whose parents rated early skills as important and held higher expectations for their children showed higher math and reading scores at the end of kindergarten. In addition, both school readiness beliefs and expectations were positively related to enrichment practices, and a significant interaction between school readiness beliefs and education was detected, such that school readiness beliefs were more strongly predictive of enrichment among parents with lower levels of education. Implications and directions for future research are discussed.

Utilisation de stimulants du système nerveux central chez les élèves du primaire suivis à l’école pour des troubles du comportement

Objectives Elementary school-aged children referred to school-based mental health services for conduct problems are commonly also prescribed central nervous system stimulants (CNSS), since many also suffer from comorbid ADHD. Nevertheless, there exists little information in the extant literature to determine to what degree the prescription of CNSS is associated with the presence of ADHD in these students or if other characteristics contribute to increasing the likelihood of CNSS use.Methods The current study was carried out on a sample of 341 students receiving school-based mental health services for conduct problems (27.8% girls, mean age of 9.9 years). ADHD and conduct problem symptomatology was assessed using a structured diagnostic instrument administered to parents and teachers.Results Results show that 39.9% of students were medicated using CNSS and that, among those who do not present ADHD symptomatology, approximately a third used CNSS. Age (6-8 years), socio-economic status (medium or high), placement in a special class for children with conduct problems, and symptoms of hyperactivity/impulsivity and oppositional defiant disorder all contributed unique variance in the prediction of utilisation of CNSS in this sample.Conclusion These results suggest that there may be several characteristics other than the presence of ADHD that can contribute to the medical decision to treat child problems with CNSS. These findings also underscore the importance of more rigorous assessment of ADHD in these children as well as longitudinal follow-up studies to determine the long-term effects of CNSS on their educational performance and eventual educational attainment.

The Black–White Education Scaled Test-Score Gap in Grades K-7

We address the ordinality of test scores by rescaling them by the average eventual educational attainment of students with a given test score in a given grade. We show that measurement error in test scores causes this approach to underestimate the black-white test score gap and use an instrumental variables procedure to adjust the gap. While the unadjusted gap grows rapidly in the early school years, particularly in reading, after correction for measurement error, the education-scaled gap is large, exceeds the actual black-white education gap and is roughly constant. Strikingly, the gap in all grades is largely explained by a small number of measures of socioeconomic background. We discuss the interpretation of scales tied to adult outcomes.

Co-Development of Education Aspirations and Postsecondary Enrollment Especially Among Students Who Are Low Income and Minority

Most adolescents, regardless of their occupational aspirations, are educationally ambitious. However, these high education ambitions are often unaligned with their occupational ones. This misalignment between students’ educational expectations and their desired careers can be personally and institutionally costly. In contrast to earlier studies of educational attainment and occupational status, which relied independently on educational expectations and occupational aspirations, this study views alignment as related and co-developing. Results show that educational expectations and occupational aspirations co-develop during high school. Misalignment between educational and occupational expectations is a significant determinant of eventual educational attainment and has implications for future labor market outcomes.

The effects of social origins and cognitive ability on educational attainment

In previous work we have shown that in Britain and Sweden alike parental class, parental status and parental education have independent effects on individuals’ educational attainment. In this paper we extend our analyses, first by also including measures of individuals’ early-life cognitive ability, and second by bringing our results for Britain and Sweden into direct comparative form. On the basis of extensive birth-cohort data for both countries, we find that when cognitive ability is introduced into our analyses, parental class, status and education continue to have significant, and in fact only moderately reduced and largely persisting, effects on the educational attainment of members of successive cohorts. There is some limited evidence for Britain, but not for Sweden, that cognitive ability has a declining effect on educational attainment, and a further cross-national difference is that in Britain, but not in Sweden, some positive interaction effects occur between advantaged social origins and high cognitive ability in relation to educational success. Overall, though, cross-national similarities are most apparent, and especially in the extent to which parental class, status and education, when taken together, create wide disparities in the eventual educational attainment of individuals who in early life were placed at similar levels of cognitive ability. Some wider implications of these findings are considered.

Adolescence to Young Adulthood: When Socioeconomic Disparities in Substance Use Emerge

We examined trends in cigarette, alcohol, and marijuana use by eventual educational attainment in 1,902 participants from Project EAT, a 10-year longitudinal study following participants from early adolescence through young adulthood. Generally, for cigarettes and marijuana, disparities were evident by early adolescence with prevalence of use highest among those who had no secondary education. With alcohol, use diverged during young adulthood when the college group reported the most weekly alcohol use while those without postsecondary education reported greatest daily use. When disparities in substance use behaviors first emerge and later escalate can guide how to craft and target interventions.

Actual age at school entry, educational outcomes, and earnings

This paper reports on the effect of actual age measured by month at school entry on test scores, eventual educational attainment, and labor market outcomes, using school test score data and a labor force survey of Japan. Japan is an ideal country for examining the pure effect of actual age at school entry on eventual years of education because the length of compulsory education does not vary by birth month and legal administrations assure that almost all children follow a fixed schedule of grade progress. Older children of both sexes in a school cohort obtain higher test scores and more education years than their younger counterparts. This better academic performance translates into higher annual earnings among males.

Immigrant Adolescents’ Individual and Environmental Influences on Young Adults’ Educational Attainment

INTRODUCTIONIn Special Issue of this Journal dedicated to Immigrant and Ethnic Minority Families, Nauck and Settles (2001) examined new challenges confronting family and migration research. They proposed, for example, that future analyses should explore both macro- and micro-level influences when investigating outcomes of children from immigrant families. Similarly, Zhou (1997) suggested that life chances of immigrant children are determined by external and intrinsic factors. he proposed that external determinants include racial stratification, spatial segregation, and economic opportunities. In contrast, intrinsic influences include family structure, community organization, human capital on arrival, and cultural patterns of social relations. The purpose of this study was to build upon previous investigations to examine impact of environmental and individual influences on immigrant children's eventual educational attainment. In analysis, relationships were examined among distal family contexts, proximal learning settings, individual characteristics, and educational attainment of young adults from Australian immigrant families.The conceptual framework for study was constructed from a bioecological model of development proposed by Bronfenbrenner and Ceci (1994) and Ceci et al. (1997), and from Bourdieu's (1984, 1988) theory of educational trajectory of individuals. In bioecological framework it is proposed that to explain variations in outcomes it is necessary to understand relations among distal family contexts, individual characteristics, proximal learning settings such as families and schools, and measures of those outcomes. Bronfenbrenner and Ceci (1994: 572) proposed:The form, power, content and direction of proximal processes affecting development vary systematically as a joint function of characteristics of developing person, of environment - both immediate and more remote - in which processes are taking place, and nature of developmental outcome under consideration.The nature of relationships between family background and outcomes was emphasized by Ceci et al. (1997: 311) who stated the efficacy of a proximal process is determined to a large degree by distal environmental resources. Proximal processes are engines that actually drive outcome but only if distal resources can be imported into process to make it effective.In development of a theory of social trajectory of individuals, Bourdieu (1984, 1998) presented a two-dimensional model of social space. The overall volume of economic and cultural capital possessed by individuals or available to them defined vertical dimension. In contrast, horizontal dimension indicated structure of individuals' capital and it is assessed by relative amounts of economic and cultural capital within total volume of their capital. In field theory, Bourdieu proposed that educational outcomes are associated with two effects that may either reinforce or offset each other. First, there is an inculcation effect exerted directly by families or by individuals' initial social conditions. Second, there is a specific effect related to an individual's system of dispositions or habitus that acts as a mediation between family background and eventual educational attainment. Bourdieu (1984:110) suggested positions of arrival are not equally probable from all starting points. While individuals are subject to forces that structure their social space, they may resist the forces of field with their specific inertia, that is, their properties, which may exist in embodied form, as dispositions, or in objectified form, in goods, qualifications, etc. (1984:110). In addition, Bourdieu (1998: 20) claimed By a series of selection processes, school system separates holders of inherited cultural capital from those who lack it: system tends to maintain preexisting social differences. …

Family Background, Individual and Environmental Influences, Aspirations and Young Adults' Educational Attainment: A follow-up study

In this follow-up study of an earlier investigation (Marjoribanks, 2002a), relationships were examined between adolescents' educational aspirations and young adults' educational attainment, after taking into account measures of family background, individual characteristics and proximal learning settings. Data were collected as part of a longitudinal survey of Australian youth (3772 females and 3476 males). The findings from the two analyses suggest that: (a) family background, individual characteristics and proximal learning settings combine to have large associations with adolescents' aspirations, and these aspirations have the largest relationship with young adults' eventual educational attainment; and (b) there are ethnic group differences in the linear and curvilinear nature of relationships involving measures of individual characteristics, adolescents' educational aspirations and young adults' educational attainment. An 'aspiration 2 attainment 2 background' model is proposed to examine the ongoing and different interactions between aspirations and academic outcomes for students from various family backgrounds.

School Athletic Participation: Mostly Gain with Little Pain

Participation in high school sports had positive effects on many Grade 12 and postsecondary outcomes (e.g., school grades, coursework selection, homework, educational and occupational aspirations, self-esteem, university applications, subsequent college enrollment, and eventual educational attainment) after controlling background variables and parallel outcomes from Grades 8 and 10 in a large, nationally representative, 6-year longitudinal study. In contrast to Zero-Sum and Threshold Models, these positive effects generalized across academic and nonacademic outcomes, across the entire range of athletic participation levels, and across different subgroups of students (e.g., SES, gender, ethnicity, ability levels, educational aspirations). Sport participation is hypothesized to increase identification/commitment to school and school values which mediate the participation effects, particularly for narrowly defined academic outcomes not directly related to sport participation. Consistent with this Identification/Commitment Model, extramural sport, and to a lesser extent team sport, had more positive effects than intramural and individual sports.

Adolescent Drug Use and Educational Attainment

Recent studies investigating the labor-market effects of illicit drug use have consistently found a positive relation between drug use and earnings. These analyses have, however, ignored the potential relationship between drug use and human-capital formation. This paper examines the effect of drug use during adolescence on formal educational attainment using a sample drawn from the National Longitudinal Survey Youth Cohort. The probability of drug use is estimated across racial groups according to three categories; use of any illicit drug, use including hard drugs, and use of only marijuana. Fitted values for the probability of drug use are calculated and entered into a regression framework to estimate the number of school years completed. The empirical results indicate that all three categories of drug use are associated with significant negative impacts on educational attainment after controlling for individual differences in personal endowments and socioeconomic characteristics. On average, adolescent drug use is found to reduce eventual educational attainment by about 1 year, ceteris paribus . These findings suggest that previous studies that focus only on the direct effects of drug use on earnings may reflect a statistical bias that leads to an overstatement of the positive effects of drug use on earnings.

Beyond Sibship Size: Sibling Density, Sex Composition, and Educational Outcomes

Beyond Sibship Size: Sibling Density, Sex Composition, and Educational Outcomes

Mothers' Expectations for Children's Schooling in Malaysia

This article examines a model of mothers' expectations for the eventual educational attainment of their young children in Peninsular Malaysia, a country undergoing rapid development. Focusing on the effects of family characteristics and of key events in young women's lives-education, labor force participation before marriage, and age at family formation-we find that age at first birth affects whether a woman works before marriage but not the type of work she does. Neither the mother's age at first birth nor workprior to marriage have any effect on her expectations for her children's schooling, whereas her own education tends to raise expectations. These findings suggest that mothers attempt to transmit education directly to their offspring through their expectations for their children's schooling.

Effects of High Schools on Their Students

Few people doubt that there are good and bad high schools, or that high-school quality is related in some way to high-school characteristics. Yet findings from studies of high-school effectiveness have not been consistent. Using data from Project Talent, Christopher Jencks and Marsha Brown show that earlier findings have been inconsistent because comprehensive high schools rarely have consistent effects on test scores, eventual educational attainment, or occupational status. Moreover, the authors find few relationships between high-school characteristics and any measure of high-school effectiveness. From these findings, they argue that,at least for whites, changes in high-school characteristics like teacher experience,class size, and social composition are unlikely to change high-school effectiveness,and that holding schools accountable for one outcome is unlikely to guarantee effectiveness on another. They also argue that the equalization of high-school quality would do little to reduce inequality among young adults, and that high schools should therefore concentrate on the elimination of intramural inequities.