The effect of the intergenerational transmission of noncognitive skills on student performance

Ildefonso Mendez

Economics of Education Review, 2015, vol. 46, issue C, 78-97

Abstract: We analyze whether country differences in the noncognitive skills or qualities that children are encouraged to learn at home, i.e. differences in culture, account for country differences in student performance. We do so by comparing PISA language, mathematics and science scores of second-generation immigrants of different origins living in Australia, Austria, Belgium, Finland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Switzerland. We use the valuation of different child qualities in the student’s country of ancestry by mid 1980s to approximate students’ cultural heritage. Our estimates suggest that culture plays a prominent role in explaining variation in 15-years-old scholastic performance. A one-standard-deviation increase in our cultural variable accounts to between 10% and 30% of the standard deviation of student performance across ancestries depending on the host country considered. We find that the intergenerational transmission of some child qualities positively related to the conscientiousness personality factor like hard work, responsibility, perseverance and thrift favors the acquisition of cognition as measured by achievement test. A similar result is obtained for the child qualities independence and imagination.

Keywords: Noncognitive skills; Culture; Test achievement; PISA (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I2 J24 Z1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (15)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0272775715000266
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ecoedu:v:46:y:2015:i:c:p:78-97

DOI: 10.1016/j.econedurev.2015.03.001

Access Statistics for this article

Economics of Education Review is currently edited by E. Cohn

More articles in Economics of Education Review from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().