Funded Research
Home and School Contexts, and Children's Achievement in the Early Elementary Years
Source: Foundation for Child Development
Active: 07/01/2009 - 06/30/2010
Investigator(s):
Katerina Bodovski
This study will examine the impacts of the two main social contexts for children -- family and school -- on their mathematics and reading learning in their early elementary school years. Previous research has shown that social class and racial/ethnic achievement gaps have their origins in the early childhood and elementary school years. Therefore, the study will focus on the determinants of these early academic trajectories, with particular focus on the influences of family and school on academic risk and resiliency, emphasizing the ways in which parents' characteristics, parenting practices, and family cognitive and emotional resources, on the one hand, and teacher's and classroom characteristics, on the other, are linked to children's cognitive development.
An understanding of the factors that promote or impede early educational success is critical for both scholarly understanding of social stratification in the U.S. and educators' and policymakers' efforts to help at-risk students. This study is taking a developmental approach, following children longitudinally from kindergarten through third grade, and uses a large, nationally representative sample of U.S. elementary school students -- the ECLS-K data.
