Family SES, Non-cognitive Skills and Achievement Inequality in Children's Early Life

Abstract

Why Do Asian Americans Academically Outperform Whites? --- The Cultural Explanation Revisited We advocate an interactive approach to examining the role of culture and SES in explaining Asian Americans’ achievement. We use Education Longitudinal Study (ELS) 2002 baseline data to test our proposition that the cultural orientation of Asian American families is different from that of white American families in ways that mediate the effects of family SES on children’s academic achievement. The results support our hypothesis, indicating that: (1) SES’s positive effects on achievement are stronger among white students than they are among Asian-Americans; (2) the association between a family’s SES and behaviors and attitudes are weaker among Asian-Americans than among Whites; (3) a fraction of the Asian-White achievement gap can be accounted for by ethnic differences in behaviors and attitudes, particularly ethnic differences in family SES’s effects on behaviors and attitudes. Non-cognitive Skills and the Growing Achievement Gap Combining the theory of accumulative advantage/disadvantage and recent scientific evidence of the importance of non-cognitive skills, I examine the relationship between the non-cognitive skills and the growing achievement gap between children from high and low socioeconomic status families from a longitudinal perspective. I use data from Early Childhood Longitudinal Program to test the propositions that (1) non-cognitive skills influence children’s development trajectory in achievement; (2) the early difference in non-cognitive skills between children from different SES background drive the SES-based achievement gap widening from kindergarten to fifth grade. The results support my hypothesis, indicating that: (1) non-cognitive skills positively affects children’s learning rate in both math and reading achievement throughout kindergarten to fifth grade; (2) SES stratification in non-cognitive skills sorts children into different growth trajectories and contributes to the cumulated achievement difference across different SES groups as children progress through school. Non-cognitive skills and the Moderated Family SES’s Effects on Education Achievement Combining the theory of resources substitution and recent evidence on the importance of children’s non-cognitive skills from social sciences, this study asks whether family SES’s effects on achievement are contingent on or moderated by children’s non-cognitive skills. I address this question from a longitudinal perspective by focusing on two developmental stages: early childhood and early adolescence. To overcome the methodological involved in answering these questions, I use Structural Nested Mean Models (SNMM), a recent development in statistical methods. Using data from Early Childhood Longitudinal Program (ECLS), I test the hypothesis that better non-cognitive skills will reduce family SES’s effects on achievement in a longitudinal setting. The results corroborate the hypothesis, indicating that non-cognitive skills will moderate family SES’s effects, and higher non-cognitive skills will lessen family SES’s effects on achievement. In addition, such moderation effects are significant during both focal developmental stages of early childhood and early adolescence.