The Effects of Children's Noncognitive Dispositions at School Entry on Long-Term Academic Outcomes

• In Event: Millennium Hotel Roundtable Session 12
  In Roundtable Session: Cultural Capital in Early Childhood and Linkages to Adolescence

Abstract

This paper investigates the role of kindergarten children’s non-cognitive dispositions on their educational outcomes in grade 3 in a longitudinal perspective. Most research on early educational inequality focusses on children’s cognitive skill development. Building on Bourdieu’s theory of habitus, we argue that non-cognitive dispositions and attitudes toward learning and school might play an equally important role in generating unequal educational chances between children of different social strata. With data of the German NEPS, we investigate (1) social inequality in children’s non-cognitive dispositions before school entry, (2) the effect of children’s dispositions before school entry on educational outcomes later in the educational career and (3) whether these dispositions (partially) mediate the effect of social class on educational outcomes.

Authors

• Frederick de Moll, Goethe University Frankfurt am Main

• Julia Tuppat, Freie Universität Berlin