Too much of a good thing? Gender, 'Concerted cultivation' and unequal achievement in primary education

Selina McCoy, Delma Byrne and Joanne Banks

No WP362, Papers from Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI)

Abstract: It is well established that cultural and economic resources imparted to children vary significantly by social class. Literature on concerted cultivation has highlighted the extent to which out-of-school activities can reproduce social inequalities in the classroom. Within this literature however, little attention has been given to the role of gender in concerted cultivation. In this paper, we use data from the first wave of the Growing Up in Ireland longitudinal study to consider how both social class and gender influence the level and type of out-of-school activities in which children engage. Moreover, we examine how out-of-school activities, class and gender impact on children's school engagement and academic achievement. We find that while childrearing logics tend to operate within social class categories, there is an additional cultural aspect of gender in the uptake of different types of out-of-school activities. Our findings suggest the need to move beyond explanations of concerted cultivation to explain gender differences in maths and reading attainment.

Keywords: social class; concerted cultivation; gender; school engagement; academic achievement; maths performance; reading performance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu, nep-lab and nep-ure
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.esri.ie/pubs/WP362.pdf (application/pdf)

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:esr:wpaper:wp362

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Papers from Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sarah Burns ().