This book focuses on the relationship between cultural capital and student achievement. It fills the gap in the literature on large-scale quantitative studies of the effects of cultural capital. In particular, the review of empirical evidence presented, especially that from studies analyzing large-scale, international data from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), makes a substantial contribution to the literature. This review addresses the knowledge gap on reviews investigating the effects of different forms of cultural capital on student achievement as compared to the more established evidence base in the related field of socioeconomic status.
This book represents a major advance in examining the problem of how to reduce inequalities in the educational and occupational attainment of students from different socio-economic, ethnic and race group backgrounds. It integrates qualitative and quantitative research orientations and methodologies. A set of family and school measures is included that might be used by researchers and students as they examine the context theory, and by educators involved in school reform programs.
The subject matter of this book – what happens in schools, the effects of curriculum change, the reasons why some children are successful and others are not – explains just why the sociology of education is one of the most important areas to achieve political importance. There are five sections to the book covering: Educational Achievement; Educational Provision; The Organization of the School; Roles in the School and Values and Learning. The editor discusses the implications of the material presented (much of which was available for the first time when this book was originally published).
How can colleges and schools support the inclusion of family, school and community engagement curricula in teacher and administrator preparation programs? The contributions in this book try to answer this question, with contributors describing their experiences, their programs, and their support for the goal of enhancing parental involvement and engagement in Schools and Colleges of Education. The authors and researchers, such as Joyce Epstein, who is the foremost researcher on the topic, have the knowledge and expertise in family, school, and community engagement and partnerships from both theory and best practice perspectives. The book is designed to be interactive, and readers are encouraged to engage themselves in the conversation. Readers are invited to e-mail any of the editors to discuss the questions posed. This book was originally published as a special issue of Teaching Education.
International interest focuses on why pupils from East-Asia tend to outperform pupils from the West and scholars have proposed a number of possible explanations to account for these international trends. Using Vygotsky's theory (1978) as a conceptual framework to "construct" school achievement, this book puts forward culturally relevant context for understanding developmental aspects of children’s school achievement and their implication to classroom practice and education progress. Converging the two important lines of inquiry – the child factor and the sociocultural factor – this book showcases evidence-based scholarly works from across the globe that shed light on causes of academic achievement in different contexts. The book brings together eminent scholars from early childhood, primary education, secondary and vocational education who expertly capture the vitality of development and processes of specific child factors and their interaction with their environment that explain their school achievement. Foregrounded in the five planes of cultural historical, institutional, social, personal and mental, the research explain how children think, learn and form the will to perform amidst the changing social and family environment, and challenging school and educational environment.
This book addresses a wide range of family variables and a diverse array of family situations in order to understand the dynamics of the multifaceted relationship between family realities and educational outcomes of children.
Using the theory of social and cultural reproduction originally posited by Pierre Bourdieu, I test the idea that social status and individual culture affect academic achievement. The data used for this analysis was from the first panel of the Education Longitudinal Study (ELS), a survey sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education and based on a nationally representative sample of 16,719 tenth-grade respondents in 2002. As one would expect, the measure of student's ability was the only variable that remained significant throughout for both classes and racial groups throughout all statistical models. The difference in the importance of upper class students and lower class is dependent on race. These findings are bolstered by other studies that show parental involvement has been shown to mediate the effects of race and socioeconomic resources in achievement gaps it could also be used as a possible strategy for reducing the achievement gap even in the presence of cultural capital.
This dissertation study explored the relationship between school-based parent involvement and early reading outcomes by positing that different types of parent involvement activities reflect access to different forms of cultural capital and therefore should be analyzed as separate constructs. Exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) techniques were used to establish the factor structure underlying measures of school-based parent involvement available in the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten Cohort of 2011 (ECLS-K: 2011). Also of interest were the variations in the amount of participation in different types of involvement between families from various sociocultural backgrounds, as well as the relationships between different types of parent involvement and early reading achievement outcomes among these groups. Before such comparisons were made, a series of multiple groups CFA models were run to establish measurement invariance among the parent involvement factors. Data were analyzed across racial/ethnic, parent education, parent occupational prestige, and primary language subgroups. Two achievement outcomes, reading IRT scores and teacher literacy ratings, were modeled separately, to determine if the observed relationships held across achievement outcomes. Finally, all analyses were conducted separately for two school types: public and non-public schools. Results indicated three components of school-based parent involvement that aligned with differences in cultural capital requirements. Subgroup differences in average values of a subset of the parent involvement factors were observed, as well as differences in the relationships between the parent involvement types and student achievement outcomes. Differences in these relationships were also observed across school type. Several directions for future research based on these findings are discussed.
The development of cross-national research attempts to a much-needed global perspective on sociological research. Its adherents overcome national, cultural, logistic and linguistic barriers in the attempt to provide truly comparative information on the human condition. This volume, stemming from the plenary sessions of the 1987 American Sociological Association annual meeting and edited by past president Melvin Kohn, presents the cutting edge of cross-national research. Its distinguished contributors from nine countries describe the theoretical possibilities and limits of this kind of endeavour, consider the difficulties of its implementation, and present a range of studies ranging from two-nation comparisons to truly global ones, that are
