TY - JOUR
T1 - Educational investment, family context, and children's math and reading growth from kindergarten through the third grade
AU - Cheadle, Jacob E.
N1 - Funding Information:
The author is grateful to Bridget Goosby for her helpful comments on this manuscript and Paul Amato, George Farkas, Nancy Landale, Wayne Osgood, Suet-ling Pong, and Sean Reardon for their useful comments and feedback during various stages of the project. This research was partially supported by a grant from the American Educational Research Association, which receives funds for its AERA Grants Program from the National Science Foundation and the National Center for Education Statistics of the Institute of Education Sciences (U.S. Department of Education) under NSF Grant REC-9980573. The opinions expressed here reflect those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the granting agencies, and all errors are, of course, the sole responsibility of the author.
PY - 2008/1
Y1 - 2008/1
N2 - Drawing on longitudinal data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 1998-1999, this study used IRT modeling to operationalize a measure of parental educational investments based on Lareau's notion of concerted cultivation. It used multilevel piecewise growth models regressing children's math and reading achievement from entry into kindergarten through the third grade on concerted cultivation and family context variables. The results indicate that educational investments are an important mediator of socioeconomic and racial/ethnic disparities, completely explaining the black-white reading gap at kindergarten entry and consistently explaining 20 percent to 60 percent and 30 percent to 50 percent of the black-white and Hispanic-white disparities in the growth parameters, respectively, and approximately 20 percent of the socioeconomic gradients. Notably, concerted cultivation played a more significant role in explaining racial/ethnic gaps in achievement than expected from Lareau's discussion, which suggests that after socioeconomic background is controlled, concerted cultivation should not be implicated in racial/ethnic disparities in learning.
AB - Drawing on longitudinal data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 1998-1999, this study used IRT modeling to operationalize a measure of parental educational investments based on Lareau's notion of concerted cultivation. It used multilevel piecewise growth models regressing children's math and reading achievement from entry into kindergarten through the third grade on concerted cultivation and family context variables. The results indicate that educational investments are an important mediator of socioeconomic and racial/ethnic disparities, completely explaining the black-white reading gap at kindergarten entry and consistently explaining 20 percent to 60 percent and 30 percent to 50 percent of the black-white and Hispanic-white disparities in the growth parameters, respectively, and approximately 20 percent of the socioeconomic gradients. Notably, concerted cultivation played a more significant role in explaining racial/ethnic gaps in achievement than expected from Lareau's discussion, which suggests that after socioeconomic background is controlled, concerted cultivation should not be implicated in racial/ethnic disparities in learning.
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U2 - 10.1177/003804070808100101
DO - 10.1177/003804070808100101
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:41249083828
SN - 0038-0407
VL - 81
SP - 1
EP - 31
JO - Sociology of Education
JF - Sociology of Education
IS - 1
ER -