Socioeconomic Status and Academic Outcomes in Developing Countries: A Meta-Analysis:
25 Sep 2019-Review of Educational Research (SAGE PublicationsSage CA: Los Angeles, CA)-Vol. 89, Iss: 6, pp 875-916
TL;DR: Despite the multiple meta-analyses documenting the association between socioeconomic status (SES) and achievement, none have examined this question outside of English-speaking industrialized countr....
Abstract: Despite the multiple meta-analyses documenting the association between socioeconomic status (SES) and achievement, none have examined this question outside of English-speaking industrialized countr...
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01 Oct 2010
TL;DR: MacLeod, Jay as mentioned in this paper conducted participant observation of two groups of male youth, the Hallway Hangers and the Brothers, living in a housing project called Clarendon Heights, but the two groups differed in important respects: the Hallways Hangers are predominantly white youth who, at that point in their young lives, openly resisted the American achievement ideology advanced by schools.
Abstract: MacLeod, Jay. 2009 (3rd ed). Ain't No Makin' It: Aspirations and Attainment in a Low-Income Neighborhood. Boulder. CO: Westview Press In Ain't No Making' It: Aspirations and Attainment in a Low-Income Neighborhood (1987) Jay MacLeod expertly shows education's role in the process of social reproduction, or how class inequality passes from one generation to the next. On the jacket cover of the third edition, preeminent sociologists-like William J. Wilson-comment enthusiastically about the updates on subjects' socio-economic status 20+ years after the initial study. They underscore the "classic" status of ANMI in scholarship on structural inequality and social reproduction. For readers unfamiliar with the book, I briefly describe the author's initial study and the contributions from data collected for the second edition. Following this, I discuss the added longitudinal data obtained for the third edition, its important new insights, and the usefulness of this book for courses in several core areas of sociology. In 1982 Jay MacLeod conducted participant observation of two groups of male youth, the Hallway Hangers and the Brothers. Both lived in a housing project called Clarendon Heights, but the two groups differed in important respects. The Hallways Hangers are predominantly white youth who, at that point in their young lives, openly resisted the American achievement ideology advanced by schools. They were dropouts and underachievers, saw few opportunities for themselves in the economy and other structures of society, and subsequently had no aspirations for a better life. In contrast the Brothers, predominantly black youth, demonstrated their belief in America as a land of opportunity by adopting its cultural norms, institutional rules, and by applying themselves in school (albeit with mixed results). They had strong faith that education would give them the needed human capital to succeed in middle-class jobs. When asked about racism, most believed that collective discrimination was a thing of the past. Any future challenges they faced from prejudicial people could be overcome with focus, hard work, and commitment. By dismissing racism and classism, both groups failed to recognize any structural basis for inequality. MacLeod also shows how the process of social reproduction works in practice. Social structure, he explains, becomes embedded in the "habitus" (Bourdieu) of the lower classes and shapes the aspirations of the Hallway Hangers and Brothers. Habitus refers to "subjects' dispositions, which reflect a class-based experience and a corresponding social grammar of taste, knowledge, and behavior." Using habitus as a theoretical framework, MacLeod stresses, helps to transcend the dualism that characterizes scholarship on social reproduction. It is not solely one-structure-or the other-agency. Both are responsible for class inequality and its reproduction. (Although MacLeod does concede that structure is primary.) The second edition is based on data collected on the men's lives nine years later, and the comparative racial dimension of this study yields another important insight into the process of social reproduction. The majority of Hallway Hangers and Brothers have jobs in the secondary labor market, with low wages, skill requirements, and irregular work. …
434 citations
TL;DR: Cooper's revised and expanded fourth edition of Research Synthesis and MetaAnalysis: A Step-by-Step Approach (2010) provides these needed guidelines with special attention given to the threats to validity at all steps of the research synthesis process.
Abstract: The need for research synthesis grows along with the volume of contemporary published scholarship. Reporting such synthesis warrants rigorous guidelines for preparing these important, information-rich documents that make statements concerning the state of knowledge about a topic, gaps in knowledge, or the aggregation or integration of primary research. Cooper’s revised and expanded fourth edition of Research Synthesis and MetaAnalysis: A Step-by-Step Approach (2010) provides these needed guidelines with special attention given to the threats to validity at all steps of the research synthesis process.
117 citations
TL;DR: The Long Shadow: Family Background, Disadvantaged Urban Youth, and the Transition to Adulthood as mentioned in this paper examines the long-term outcomes of the Beginning School Study Youth Panel (BSSYP), a representative sample of Baltimore public school first-graders selected in the fall of 1982 and followed through 2006.
Abstract: Baltimore entered the national spotlight in April 2015 with the death of Freddie Gray and the ensuing citywide protests. While The Long Shadow: Family Background, Disadvantaged Urban Youth, and the Transition to Adulthood does not deal specifically with issues of police brutality, its focus on the urban disadvantaged in Baltimore feels particularly important given these recent events. This book is the culmination of over two decades of research by some of sociology’s most respected scholars. Utilizing a life course developmental perspective, the authors examine the long-term outcomes of the Beginning School Study Youth Panel (BSSYP), a representative sample of Baltimore public school first-graders selected in the fall of 1982 and followed through 2006. A particular strength of the sample is the oversampling of poor whites. The existence and inclusion of poor and lower SES whites allows the researchers to examine racial differences within, and not simply across, socioeconomicstrata,a strategy that is often missing from studies of urban poverty. While the BSSYP study followed the children through high school, the authors fielded additional surveys after high school when the sample averaged age 22 (the Young Adult Survey, YAS) and 28 (the Mature Adult Survey, MAS). Sprinkled throughout the text are also short qualitative quotes used to illustrate some statistical points. The first chapter of the book introduces the reader to Baltimore, discusses the challenges facing the urban poor, and describes the study’s sampling and methods. The second chapter provides a relatively brief synopsis of Baltimore’s movement from ‘‘industrial boom’’ to ‘‘industrial bust.’’ While this narrative will be familiar to those with knowledge of the deindustrialization of Northeastern and Midwestern cities through the twentieth century, the authors do a particularly nice job of reminding readers that while these events might now seem to be in the distant past, they were crucial events in the life course of their sample’s parents. Chapters Three and Four focus on the early life of the BSSYP, paying specific attention to how family (Chapter 3) and neighborhood and school (Chapter 4) influence young people. Given that the research looks at these young people and their families in the early 1980s, much of what is discussed in these chapters should be familiar to readers. In Chapter Five, the authors move beyond the BSSYP and examine their sample’s transition into adulthood. The authors analyze four demographic markers: gaining employment, marrying (or partnering), moving out of the parental home, and becoming parents. They then identify the most common patterns of completion (or lack thereof) of these markers and the family background most often attached to these patterns. Those still reading this review carefully will notice educational completion is not included in the patterns discussed above. This is unique, as education has generally been treated as one of the ‘‘traditional’’ markers of the transition to adulthood by scholars. The authors argue that while the other transitions are clear-cut (that is, one clearly becomes a parent or does not), education does not have as finite an end and therefore is not included in these analyses. Instead, levels of education and employment (occupational status and earnings) are the socioeconomic destinations of the sample the authors focus on in Chapters Six through Eight. The authors find that baccalaureate completion by age 28 is particularly difficult for those from the lowest socioeconomic strata in the sample. There are also differences in employment by race and gender, a topic examined
54 citations
TL;DR: The findings suggest that there is a pathway from family SES to children's academic achievement through parental academic involvement and that this pathway is dependent on the level of parental subjective social mobility.
Abstract: Background Low family socio-economic status (SES) is usually associated with children's poor academic achievement, but the mechanisms underlying this relationship are less understood. Aims The present study examined the mediating role of parental academic involvement and the moderating role of parental subjective social mobility in this relationship with cross-sectional data. Sample and methods A total of 815 fourth- to sixth-grade children were recruited from five elementary schools in China. Family SES (measured by parents' education, parents' occupation and family income) and parental subjective social mobility were obtained directly from parents, parental academic involvement was reported by children, and information on children's academic achievement was collected from their teachers. Results The results showed that (1) both family SES and parental academic involvement were positively correlated with children's Chinese and math achievement, (2) parental academic involvement mediated the relationships between family SES and children's Chinese and math achievement, and (3) parental subjective social mobility moderated the path from family SES to parental academic involvement. The models of children's Chinese and math achievement showed that the association between family SES and parental academic involvement was weak among children's parents who reported high levels of subjective social mobility. Conclusions These findings suggest that there is a pathway from family SES to children's academic achievement through parental academic involvement and that this pathway is dependent on the level of parental subjective social mobility.
35 citations
References
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TL;DR: The authors found that the effect of democracy on economic growth is largely indirect through increased life expectancy in poor countries and increased secondary education in non-poor countries and that there are important indirect effects of democracy that are manifested through public health and education.
Abstract: Democracy is more than just another brake or booster for the economy. We argue that there are significant indirect effects of democracy on growth through public health and education. Where economists use life expectancy and education as proxies for human capital, we expect democracy will be an important determinant of the level of public services manifested in these indicators. In addition to whatever direct effect democracy may have on growth, we predict an important indirect effect through public policies that condition the level of human capital in different societies. We conduct statistical investigations into the direct and indirect effects of democracy on growth using a data set consisting of a 30-year panel of 128 countries. We find that democracy has no statistically significant direct effect on growth. Rather, we discover that the effect of democracy is largely indirect through increased life expectancy in poor countries and increased secondary education in nonpoor countries. T he relationship between democracy and economic growth has received considerable attention in recent years. As yet, however, there is no consensus among analysts on the relationship between these two widely studied variables. Sound theoretical positions have been advanced suggesting that democracy is both an impediment and facilitator of growth. Careful quantitative tests of the relationship have produced contradictory results. In our view, existing studies fail to develop an adequate political theory of growth and as a result their empirical models are typically misspecified. With competing arguments on both sides of the question, many analysts merely add a variable for democracy to existing economic models and then look at the sign of the coefficient and its significance. This is inadequate. Democracy is more than just another brake or booster for the economy. We argue that there are important indirect effects of democracy on growth that are manifested through public health and education. Where economists typically use life expectancy and secondary school enrollment as proxies for human capital, we expect that democracy will itself be an important determinant of the level of public services captured in these indicators. Thus, in
419 citations
"Socioeconomic Status and Academic O..." refers background in this paper
...Country wealth, economic integration, the level of urbanization, democratization, and the amount and flow of foreign aid are all critical determinants of basic educational attainment (Ansell, 2008; Baum & Lake 2003; Miller, 2016)....
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TL;DR: This article evaluated the effects of school-based interventions on learning in developing-country primary schools and found that the largest mean effect sizes included treatments with computers or instructional technology (0.15), teacher training, small classes, smaller learning groups within classes, or ability grouping.
Abstract: I gathered 77 randomized experiments (with 111 treatment arms) that evaluated the effects of school-based interventions on learning in developing-country primary schools. On average, monetary grants and deworming treatments had mean effect sizes that were close to zero and not statistically significant. Nutritional treatments, treatments that disseminated information, and treatments that improved school management or supervision, had small mean effect sizes (0.04–0.06) that were not always robust to controls for study moderators. The largest mean effect sizes included treatments with computers or instructional technology (0.15); teacher training (0.12); smaller classes, smaller learning groups within classes, or ability grouping (0.12); contract or volunteer teachers (0.10); student and teacher performance incentives (0.09); and instructional materials (0.08). Metaregressions suggested that the effects of contract teachers and materials were partly accounted for by composite treatments that included train...
370 citations
"Socioeconomic Status and Academic O..." refers background in this paper
...Up to date, the majority of meta-analyses in education including developing countries have been focused on program effectiveness and examined attainment outcomes (Conn, 2017; García & Saavedra, 2017; Krishnaratne, White, & Carpenter, 2013; McEwan, 2015; Petrosino, Morgan, Fronius, Tanner-Smith, & Boruch, 2015)....
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...…majority of meta-analyses in education including developing countries have been focused on program effectiveness and examined attainment outcomes (Conn, 2017; García & Saavedra, 2017; Krishnaratne, White, & Carpenter, 2013; McEwan, 2015; Petrosino, Morgan, Fronius, Tanner-Smith, & Boruch, 2015)....
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...The only two meta-analyses that examined achievement outcomes in program effectiveness studies are McEwan (2015) and Petrosino et al. (2015), who explored test scores, grades, and achievement measures as “ancillary effects” beyond the main effects of educational attainment....
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TL;DR: In this article, auteur tente de comprendre a quel niveau le developpement national economique influence le processus de reproduction sociale en milieu scolaire a travers la production du capital humain.
Abstract: L'interaction entre reproduction sociale, production du capital humain et developpement economique national est un objet de recherche majeur dans le cadre d'une etude comparative transnationale. Dans le cadre d'une opposition entre pays developpes, l'auteur tente de comprendre a quel niveau le developpement national economique influence le processus de reproduction sociale en milieu scolaire a travers la production du capital humain. L'influence de l'origine sociale et de l'environnement scolaire sur le rendement dans deux matieres, en science et mathematiques est illustree ici a travers la publication de donnees statistiques.
367 citations
"Socioeconomic Status and Academic O..." refers background or result in this paper
...…(1983) was based on a sample of 29 countries including nine countries from Latin America and only one country from Europe and Central Asia, while Baker et al. (2003) was based on 35 countries including only one from Latin America and eight from Europe and Central Asia that have very different…...
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...Baker et al (2003) found that between 1970s and 1994, the effect of family background had increased relative to school effects such that the relative effect of school resources and family background on achievement within nations was no longer associated with national income levels (GDP)....
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...…al., 2017; Letourneau et al., 2013; Wang et al., 2014) and also searched studies that cited the key studies by Sirin (2005), Harwell et al. (2017), Heyneman-Loxley (1983), and Baker et al. (2003), but we did not find any further studies beyond what we already identified through the prior searches....
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...Baker, Goesling, and LeTendre (2003) have updated the study using comparable 1994 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) data, and concluded that the Heyneman-Loxley effect had diminished from the 1970s to the mid-1990s....
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...…be more the case in wealthier nations with more income to invest in public education, but in poorer countries, variation in school quality reaches further below these threshold levels, creating the conditions for the Heyneman-Loxley effect (see Heyneman & Loxley, 1983; see also Baker et al., 2003)....
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TL;DR: This article examined the extent that material, social, and cultural resources and schools account for the relationship between socioeconomic background and student achievement among 15-year-olds in 30 countries and found that over 60% of the effect of socioeconomic background on achievement is accounted for by these factors.
Abstract: This paper examines the extent that material, social, and cultural resources and schools account for the relationship between socioeconomic background and student achievement among 15-year-olds in 30 countries. Generally, cultural factors play a more important role in most countries although in a small minority of countries, material resources have a substantial impact. Most often, social resources have little impact. In many countries, educational differentiation—that is, school tracks and school types, and curriculum tracking within schools—mediates the relationship between socioeconomic background and student achievement. Countries with highly tracked systems tend to show stronger relationships. On average, over 60% of the effect of socioeconomic background on achievement is accounted for by these factors. These findings are independent of whether achievement in reading, mathematics, or science is examined. The implications of this study for reducing socioeconomic inequalities in education are discussed.
235 citations
"Socioeconomic Status and Academic O..." refers background in this paper
...in education systems, which are important goals for nations to achieve (Marks et al., 2006; Schleicher, 2014)....
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...876 in education systems, which are important goals for nations to achieve (Marks et al., 2006; Schleicher, 2014)....
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08 Dec 2009
218 citations
"Socioeconomic Status and Academic O..." refers background in this paper
...High-SES families are seen as increasingly subtle in their deployment of resources to secure their children an advantage to maintain their social status, such as through hiring admissions, tutoring, and so on (Van Zanten, 2009; Van Zanten et al., 2015)....
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