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Culture and Asian-White Achievement DifferenceThe first component of my dissertation “Why Do Asian Americans Academically Outperform Whites? --- The Cultural Explanation Revisited” (lead authored in Social Science Research), takes an interactive approach to examining the role of culture and SES in explaining Asian Americans’ achievement. I use Education Longitudinal Study (ELS) 2002 baseline data to test the 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. Results show that: (1) the positive effects of SES on achievement are stronger among white students than they are among Asian-Americans; (2) the association between a family’s SES and their children’s behaviors and attitudes are weaker among Asian-Americans than among Whites; and (3) 80 percent of the Asian-White achievement gap can be accounted for by ethnic differences in children’s behaviors and attitudes, particularly ethnic differences in the effects of family SES’s on behaviors and attitudes.
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Non-Cognitive Skills and Growing Education InequalityMy second dissertation paper, entitled “Non-cognitive Skills and the Growing Achievement Gap” (Under Review), focuses on the relationship between non-cognitive skills and education achievement from a dynamic and longitudinal perspective, and examines the role of non-cognitive skills in maintaining and widening SES inequality in achievement as children progress through school. Using data from Early Childhood Longitudinal Program (ECLS), I assess whether and how non-cognitive skills evolving after school entry account for the growing SES achievement difference by mediating family SES’s effects on learning, which is measured by monthly improvement in math and reading ability. I test the following hypotheses: (1) a. non-cognitive skills are stratified by family SES throughout early school years, and b. the above persistent difference is largely because that initial SES difference in non-cognitive skills reinforces and maintains itself overtime by a path-dependent process; (2) non-cognitive skills positively influence learning; and (3) non-cognitive skills account for the growing SES achievement gap by mediating family SES’s positive effects on learning. Results support these hypotheses, suggesting that continuous differences in non-cognitive skills can magnify the SES achievement difference during kindergarten and fifth grade. Results also suggest that in the absence of any intervention, early SES differences in non-cognitive skills could reproduce themselves over time by a path-dependent process.
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Family SES and Achievement overtime:
The third paper in my dissertation “Can Non-cognitive Skills Compensate for Background Disadvantage? --- The Moderation of Non-cognitive Skills on Family SES and Achievement during Early Childhood and Early Adolescence” (Under Review), examines whether family SES’s effects on achievement are contingent on or moderated by children’s non-cognitive skills. With the fact in mind that children’s development is a longitudinal process, I address this problem from a longitudinal perspective by incorporating two developmental stages: early childhood and early adolescence. Traditional regression methods in sociology are insufficient to answer this longitudinal moderation problem, so 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 reduce family SES’s effects on achievement over time. The results corroborate the hypothesis, indicating that better non-cognitive skills do weaken family SES’s effects on achievement. In addition, such moderation effects are significant during both focal developmental stages of early childhood and early adolescence. These results also imply that individual level characteristics interact with family level resources to influence one’s social outcomes in the stratification process, which should be given more attention in future studies in inequality.
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Child Development in China
My lead-authored study (in Research in Social Stratification and Mobility), addresses the debate over the significance of family’s monetary versus non-monetary resources in children’s achievement and development in China. We use data from the 2010 baseline survey of the China Family Panel Study to examine the relevance of several proposed determinants of Chinese children’s achievement. The findings suggest that: (1) family income is significantly associated with children’s achievement, but other monetary resources measurements such as education expenditure have limited effects; (2) non-monetary resources, particularly parenting characteristics, are of great importance to children’s achievement; and (3) parenting practices do not vary greatly by family economic resources. I have also collaborated with two other Chinese colleagues to examine inequality in children’s well-being (cognitive, non-cognitive, and physical) in contemporary China (in Chinese Journal of Sociology). Findings from these works suggest that the factors that influence children’s wellbeing, as well as their significance, differ between China and US. For example, in contrast to U.S., where critical educational resources can be purchased directly with money, education opportunities and resources in China are deeply affected by government policies; there is also a strong emphasis on good parents and education to children’s success in traditional Confucian culture. These and other distinctions of Chinese society make monetary resources less significant to children’s development than non-monetary resources such as parents’ attitudes and parenting behaviors. These results highlight the importance of taking a society’s characteristics, for example, its state policy, the level of marketization, tradition and etc. into account when studying child development, and how differences in these characteristics will affect the importance of different factors to children’s wellbeing
