Parental Practices, Emotional Capital, and Academic Achievement in Elementary School

• In Event: Exclusive and Transformative Teacher Education

Proposal

Relevance to CIES 2023
Educational research has documented the existing inequality by socio-economic status and gender in students’ academic achievement, with girls and higher socio-economic status students having an advantage. Our study investigates a new way to reduce this inequality by investing in students’ and parents’ emotional capital. This study is relevant to CIES 2023 theme of improving education for a more equitable world, as we examine a new mechanism that sheds light on both what hinders educational equity and how it can be improved. We define emotional capital as an individual’s capacity to identify, process and mobilize emotions in a constructive way to achieve certain goals. While socio-emotional learning has received a considerable attention in the field of education, to our knowledge no study has conceptualized its elements within the stratification framework to apply it to reducing inequality in children’s outcomes. Utilizing the data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 2010-11 (ECLS-K:2011), this paper examines the extent to which parents’ own emotional capital and parental practices during kindergarten year are related to students’ emotional capital in fifth grade; and whether students’ emotional capital is associated with their academic achievement in fifth grade.

Theoretical framework
A small body of literature within sociology of education explored emotional capital in the past (Allatt, 1993; Nowotny, 1981). This concept was developed within the context of parenting, focusing particularly on mothers, as it explored their feelings about school experiences of their children and child rearing, and how it shapes student outcomes (Gillies, 2006; Reay, 2000, 2004). We are expanding this literature, linking it to students’ own emotional capital. We argue that positive emotional investment in the educational process serves as a type of capital: a student emotionally available for learning, with an adequate sense of their capacity, feeling belonging to their school, connection to their peers, and support from staff is able to set realistic goals and work towards achieving them. While existing studies documented SES differences in parental emotional capital, no quantitative study documented variation in emotional capital by student background, nor linked it to various children’s outcomes.
Furthermore, within the economics of education an innovative body of literature considers emotional capital as crucial to development and maintenance of human capital, conceptualizing it as a “set of emotional competencies that is useful for personal, professional, and organizational development… and has personal, economic, and social return” (Gendron 2017, 2019; Gendron et al., 2016). Emotional capital is different from emotional intelligence and other constructs used in psychology and educational psychology, as it treats these skills as a capital rather than a characteristic of the student. As capitals operate, emotional capital can be combined with, affected by, or transferred to other types of capital: human capital (knowledge and skills), cultural capital (attitudes and dispositions) and social capital (activating resources through social networks) to bring about educational success.

Data and methods
We utilized data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 2010-11 (ECLS-K:2011), a nationally representative sample of the US students selected from both public and private schools. All analyses were adjusted using longitudinal weights, designed to produce nationally representative estimates. The final analytic sample was 10,472.

We measured student’s emotional capital by the following five components (each is a scale based on several questions from the student questionnaire): engagement, school belonging, grit, peer social support, and life satisfaction. To measure academic achievement, we used math and reading scores from independent NCES assessment. We used the following measures of parental emotional capital (each measure is a scale from the parental questionnaire): frustration, warmth and depression. Further, we used the following measures of parental practices: parental social capital, school involvement, educational trips, educational expectations, and the use of corporal punishment. We included the following control variables: family socioeconomic status (SES), race/ethnicity, gender, family structure, and English language learners’ status (measured by another language primarily spoken at home).
We estimated ordinary least squares (OLS) regression models to first examine the relationship between parents’ emotional capital and parental practices, and students’ emotional capital. Each measure of emotional capital (engagement, school belonging, grit, peer social support, and satisfaction) was predicted from student’s background characteristics and students’ previous achievement in the spring of kindergarten and then parents’ emotional capital and parental practices variables were added to the model. Next, we estimated a series of OLS regression models in order to investigate the relationship between parents’ emotional capital, parental practices, student’s emotional capital and academic achievement. Students’ fifth grade scores were predicted from student’s background characteristics and students’ previous achievement. We then added the measures of parents’ emotional capital and parental practices, and finally the five measures of student emotional capital.

Findings and contribution
We found that parental depression was consistently associated with lower measures on all five components of student’s emotional capital. Parental frustration was associated with lower measures on engagement, life satisfaction and peer support, whereas parental warmth was positively associated with student engagement, grit and life satisfaction. Higher parental educational expectations were positively associated with student engagement and grit. Parental social capital was positively associated with a stronger feeling of school belonging and peer support, and parental school involvement was associated with higher life satisfaction.

With regards to academic achievement, we found that several measures of student emotional capital were related to higher math and reading scores. Specifically, student engagement, peer support and life satisfaction were positively associated with both reading and math achievement. Parental frustration was negatively and significantly associated with both reading and math scores in 5th grade. Our findings highlight the importance of both parents’ and students’ emotional capital as an important foundation for acquiring human capital- students’ academic achievement at the end of the elementary school.

Our paper makes an important theoretical contribution to the research on educational inequality by incorporating emotional capital into the stratification model. We demonstrate that various aspects of parental emotional capital have an association with both children’s emotional capital and their academic achievement. These findings highlight the acute need to support both students and parents.

Authors

• Katerina Bodovski, Penn State University

• Yeonwoo Lee, The Pennsylvania State University