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Child outcomes vary by family’s socioeconomic status (SES). Research on explanatory factors underlying early SES-related disparities has mainly focused on specific child outcomes (e.g., language skills) and selected influencing factors in single countries often with a focus on individual differences but not explicitly on early SES-related gaps. This study uses harmonised data from longitudinal large-scale studies conducted in the United Kingdom, United States, and Germany to examine parental education-related gaps in early child language and social skills. Twelve theoretically proposed family-, child-, and childcare-related factors were systematically evaluated as explanatory factors. In all countries, parental education-related gaps were particularly pronounced for early child language compared to social skills. In the decomposition analyses, the home learning environment was the only measure that significantly explained gaps in all child outcomes across all countries. Early centre-based care attendance, family income, and maternal age at childbirth contributed to gaps in child outcomes with the specific pattern of results varying across outcomes and countries. Maternal depressive feelings significantly contributed only to explaining gaps in children’s social skills. Thus, while some mechanisms found to underpin early parental education-related gaps can be generalized from single-country, single-domain studies, others are outcome- and context-specific.

Does schooling affect socioeconomic inequality in educational achievement? Earlier studies based on seasonal comparisons suggest schooling can equalize social gaps in learning. Yet recent replication studies have given rise to skepticism about the validity of older findings. We shed new light on the debate by estimating the causal effect of 1st-grade schooling on achievement inequality by socioeconomic family background in Germany. We elaborate a differential exposure approach that estimates the effect of exposure to 1st-grade schooling by exploiting (conditionally) random variation in test dates and birth dates for children who entered school on the same calendar day. We use recent data from the German NEPS to test school-exposure effects for a series of learning domains. Findings clearly indicate that 1st-grade schooling increases children’s learning in all domains. However, we do not find any evidence that these schooling effects differ by children’s socioeconomic background. We conclude that, although all children gain from schooling, schooling has no consequences for social inequality in learning. We discuss the relevance of our findings for sociological knowledge on the role of schooling in the process of stratification and highlight how our approach complements seasonal comparison studies.

I study the effects of early between-school ability tracking on student achievement. My research design exploits institutional differences between German federal states: in all states about 40% of students transition to separate academic-track schools after comprehensive primary school. Depending on the state, the remaining student body is either directly tracked between two additional school types or taught comprehensively for another two years. Comparing these students before and after tracking in a triple-differences framework, I find evidence for positive effects of prolonged comprehensive schooling on mathematics and reading scores. The average effects are almost entirely driven by low achievers, while effects for high achievers are null. Early and rigid forms of tracking can thus impair both the equity and the efficiency of school systems.

Teacher-assigned grades provide important information that is used by universities and colleges to make admission decisions and by employers to make hiring decisions. Besides grades, the results of standardized achievement tests are frequently used for student selection and allocation. However, correlations between the two achievement measures are far from perfect, and researchers have argued that this discrepancy can be at least partially attributed to norm-referenced grading, which is based on the composition of performance in a class. In this study, we investigated the results of a curricular intensification reform, which introduced changes in the distribution of student performance by making enrollment in certain courses mandatory. We investigated whether the reform resulted in changes in the relationship between standardized achievement-test results and teacher-assigned grades. We analyzed cohort control design data from two large representative samples of students from two German states (Baden-Württemberg: N=5,574; Thuringia: N=2,202) before and after the reform. Results indicated that students who received a certain grade before the reform (e.g., a grade of A, B, C, or D) differed in their standardized test performance from students who received the same grade after the reform. Furthermore, in math, course-level-specific reform effects on the association between grades and standardized test performance were found to vary between groups of students receiving good and poor grades. Implications for educational policy and school reforms and suggestions for grading are discussed.

Both the Wisconsin model of status attainment (WIM) and rational choice theory (RCT) indicate that social class differentials in student educational aspirations are partially determined by academic performance. Conditional on performance, the WIM predicts that social influence mechanisms explain the remaining class differentials, whereas RCT maintains that rational calculus factors provide the explanation. Both theories have rarely been compared directly using large-scale empirical data. Moreover, the appropriateness of these models has been questioned for highly stratified and selective educational systems such as Germany’s. In this article, we analyse the extent to which the WIM and RCT can explain the relationship between students’ social class origins and their educational aspirations. We use data from the National Educational Panel Study and analysed the aspirations of 4,896 ninth-graders in German schools along with data about their school performance, social class positions, social influences, and rational choice factors. Our mixed logit models largely confirm that both social influences and rational choice factors mediate class differentials. Five factors contribute the most: parents’ expectations, friends’ aspirations, the motive of status maintenance, costs, and perceived probability of success. This research confirms that both the WIM and RCT can each independently explain aspirations and class differentials in aspirations.

In this paper we estimate the effects of college education on cognitive abilities, health, and wages, exploiting exogenous variation in college availability. By means of semiparametric local instrumental variables techniques we estimate marginal treatment effects in an environment of essential heterogeneity. The results suggest positive average effects on cognitive abilities, wages, and physical health. Yet, there is heterogeneity in the effects, which points toward selection into gains. Although the majority of individuals benefits from more education, the average causal effect for individuals with the lowest unobserved desire to study is zero for all outcomes. Mental health effects, however, are absent for the entire population.

Low-achieving students are at risk of experiencing a pattern of emotional, motivational, and cognitive deficits called school-related helplessness if they attribute their low achievement to low aptitude. Teachers' beliefs about the causes of students' low achievement are important sources of attributional information for students. In a sample of 2117 German ninth-graders attending the lowest track, 118 math and 129 German-language teachers, we tested whether teachers' beliefs about the extent to which aptitude causes achievement moderated the achievement-helplessness relation in students and whether there were differences between math and German. Multilevel analyses revealed that low prior achievement predicted higher helplessness in both subjects but the effect was stronger in math than in German. Teachers' beliefs amplified the achievement-helplessness relation in math but not in German. Results are discussed regarding domain-specific epistemological beliefs, and implications for research and practice are derived.

We investigate to what extent individual transitions to vocational training in Germany have been affected by local labour-market conditions. A statistical decomposition approach is developed and applied, allowing for a systematic differentiation between long-term change, short-term fluctuations, and structural regional differences in labour-market conditions. To study individual-level consequences for transitions to vocational training, regionalized labour-market data are merged with longitudinal data from the National Educational Panel Study, and multivariate transition-rate models are fitted. The results indicate that structural differences between regions have had significant effects on the transition behaviour of school leavers, whereas temporary crises have been of only minor relevance. Moreover, different groups have been affected to different degrees by varying labour-market conditions. We also highlight the usefulness of our decomposition approach for a broader set of applications.

The persistence of horizontal sex segregation in higher education continues to puzzle social scientists. To help resolve this puzzle, we analyze a sample of college entrants in Germany with a discrete choice design that allows for social learning from the experiences of others. We make at least two contributions to the state of research. First, we test whether essentialist gender stereotypes affect major selection mostly through internalization or rather as external constraints that high school graduates adapt their behavior to. Empirically, we find that internalized vocational interests better explain gendered major choices than conformance with friends’ and parents’ expectations does. Second, we scrutinize whether segregation results from women’s anticipation of gendered family roles or from their anticipation of sex-based discrimination, but we find no evidence for either of these hypotheses. As in most previous studies, differences in mathematics achievement fail to explain gendered patterns of selection into college majors.

Although the simple view of reading and other theories suggest that listening comprehension is an important determinant of reading comprehension, previous research on linguistic transfer has mainly focused on the role of first language (L1) decoding skills in second language (L2) reading. The present study tested the assumption that listening comprehension in L1 is a significant predictor of language minority students’ reading comprehension in L2. In addition, we explored whether the cross-linguistic relationship is particularly pronounced at higher levels of L1 proficiency. The sample included 502 9th grade students with Russian as L1 and 662 9th grade students with Turkish as L1 from a nationwide study conducted in Germany. The L1s of these students differ in their similarity to their L2, German: Russian is considerably more similar to German than is Turkish. In both language groups, L1 listening comprehension significantly predicted L2 reading comprehension in linear regression models; this was also true after important control variables were taken into account. Polynomial regression models indicated that the relationship between L1 proficiency and L2 proficiency was linear in the Russian sample, yet stronger at higher levels of L1 proficiency in the Turkish sample. Thus, the prediction that transfer should be more pronounced at higher levels of L1 proficiency was also partly supported. Our study extends the range of L1 skills previously known to transfer to L2 reading. We found the predicted relationship between L1 listening comprehension and L2 reading comprehension in 2 language groups with varying degrees of language similarity, suggesting that the effect is language-independent. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)