Investigating the effects of social context on individual differences in children’s educational outcomes

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Abstract

Social inequalities in children’s educational outcomes persist in most countries. To improve understanding of how inequality affects educational outcomes, our symposium brings together four studies that have used innovative methodological approaches in socioeconomically and ethnically diverse samples of children from the US, UK and Germany to test how children's social contexts – their families, neighborhoods, and schools - shape their education outcomes.

Paper 1 uses machine learning methods in two samples of Florida school students to construct multidimensional models incorporating home, neighborhood, and school influences to predict early reading difficulties. Paper 2 uses cross-cohort comparisons from 15 birth cohort studies that sampled representative populations from Britain born between 1921 and 2011, to track persistence and change in associations between family socioeconomic status and children’s school performance in the UK over 95 years. Paper 3 investigates the academic risks of growing up in low SES neighborhoods and whether children’s individual characteristics may serve as protective factors in a UK-based longitudinal, multi-ethnic birth cohort. Paper 4 capitalizes on a natural experiment – COVID-associated school closures in Germany – to disentangle whether inequalities in children’s educational outcomes originate primarily inside schools or children’s homes.

Through state-of-the-art analyses of large, representative samples of children in different countries and school systems, this symposium showcases new insights on the origins of educational inequalities, which we believe will of interest to developmental researchers, interventionists, education professionals, and policymakers.

Sub Unit

• Education, Schooling

Chair

• Jasmin Wertz, Duke University

Discussant

• Hanna Dumont, University of Potsdam

Individual Presentations

• Using Machine Learning to Predict Individual Differences in Reading Achievement - Presenting Author: Mia Daucourt, Yale University; Non-Presenting Author: Sara Hart, Florida State University

• Persistent influence of family socioeconomic status on education in Britain over 95 years - Presenting Author: Sophie von Stumm, University of York; Non-Presenting Author: Sophie N. Cave, University of York; Non-Presenting Author: Paul Wakeling, University of York

• Young Children’s Prosocial Behavior Protects Against Academic Risk in Neighborhoods with Low Socio-Economic Status - Presenting Author: Emma Armstrong-Carter, Stanford University; Non-Presenting Author: Jonas G. Miller, Stanford University; Non-Presenting Author: Liam JB Hill, University of Leeds; Non-Presenting Author: Ben Domingue