It remains unclear how far back the intergenerational transmission of educational advantage operates because most inquiries are limited to two or three generations. In this study, the authors use four generations of family data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to examine the association of great-grandparents’ educational attainment with their great-grandchildren’s early academic achievement, net of intervening generations’ educational attainments. The authors find that the relationship between great-grandparent educational attainment and great-grandchild early academic achievement is nonlinear, modest, and accounted for entirely by the educational attainment of intervening generations and great-grandchild demographic characteristics. Thus, for early academic achievement, the direct transmission of intergenerational educational advantage is limited to three generations in these data.
This study utilized data from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (
- PAR ID:
- 10378888
- Publisher / Repository:
- Wiley-Blackwell
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Child Development
- Volume:
- 91
- Issue:
- 5
- ISSN:
- 0009-3920
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
more » « less
-
Whether and to what extent kindergarten children's executive functions (EF) constitute promising targets of early intervention is currently unclear. This study examined whether kindergarten children's EF predicted their second‐grade academic achievement and behavior. This was done using (a) a longitudinal and nationally representative sample (N = 8,920, Mage = 97.6 months), (b) multiple measures of EF, academic achievement, and behavior, and (c) extensive statistical control including for domain‐specific and domain‐general lagged dependent variables. All three measures of EF—working memory, cognitive flexibility, and inhibitory control—positively and significantly predicted reading, mathematics, and science achievement. In addition, inhibitory control negatively predicted both externalizing and internalizing problem behaviors. Children's EF constitute promising targets of experimentally evaluated interventions for increasing academic and behavioral functioning.more » « less
-
Guided by the notion of academic momentum, this study drew data from longitudinal transcript records at a large public 4-year research university and examined factors that specifically contribute to community college transfer students’ academic momentum. It also explored how early academic momentum along with students’ sociodemographic characteristics impact degree attainment in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields of study. This study conducted multinomial logistic regression analysis and found that certain students’ background characteristics (i.e., gender, age, and family income), community college academic achievement (i.e., associate degree completion, and number of community college credits accepted), and early academic performance at the 4-year university (math and English preparedness, number of credit hours attempted, and first-semester grade point average) were significantly related to transfer students’ likelihood of obtaining a STEM degree. The findings provide new knowledge about academic momentum and could be used to enhance the community college pathway to STEM degree completion.more » « less
-
more » « less
Executive functioning (EF) has been shown to relate to academic achievement and well-being. Independent bodies of work have aimed to understand what environmental or personal attributes influence EF ability. However, most research has not considered how constellations of risk factors create distinct patterns of influence on EF ability. The current study tested a sample of children aged 9 to 10 years from the United States ( N = 10,323, 48.06% female, Mage= 9.9 years, age range = 8.9–11.08 years) using a latent profile analysis (LPA) to detect subgroups that varied in their combinations of various risk factors. Six distinct groups of risk factors for children emerged, which in turn related to different average EF abilities. We found that family socioeconomic measures related to a subgroup having above- or below-average EF ability, but we also found an effect on EF across different risk factors. These results inform our understanding of individual variations in EF ability and highlight the idea that EF interventions should consider risk holistically.
-
more » « less
Prior research has demonstrated that teacher-student relationships characterized by high levels of closeness and low levels of conflict are associated with higher levels of academic achievement among children. At the same time: (a) some research suggests that the quality of teacher-student relationships in part reflects the quality of early caregiving, and (b) the observed quality of early care by primary caregivers robustly predicts subsequent academic achievement. Given the potential for associations between teacher-student relationship quality and academic achievement to thus be confounded by the quality of early parenting experiences, the present study examined to what extent children’s experiences in early life with primary caregivers (i.e., ages 3 to 42 months) and relationships with teachers during grade school (i.e., Kindergarten to Grade 6) were uniquely associated with an objective assessment of academic achievement at age 16 years in a sample born into poverty ( N = 267; 45% female; 65% White/non-Hispanic; 41% of mothers did not complete high school). Early maternal sensitivity, though a strong predictor of later academic achievement, was not reliably associated with either teacher-reports or interview-based assessments of teacher-student relationship quality in grade school. Nonetheless, early maternal sensitivity and teacher-student relationship quality were each uniquely associated with later academic achievement, above and beyond key demographic variables. Taken together, the present results highlight that the quality of children’s relationships with adults at home and at school independently, but not interactively, predicted later academic achievement in a high-risk sample.
