Parents' socioeconomic status and children's academic ... - Nova

4 Parental characteristics and school
outcomes: some empirical evidence
This chapter shows how school results correlate with parental characteristics.
It comprises two main parts, one based on bivariate and the other on
multivariate analysis. The first part has four sections, the first of which
provides descriptive statistics of the pupils and their performance. The
remaining sections focus on the association between children’s academic
performance and parental socioeconomic status: the second section is on
parents’ education, the third on employment and the fourth on cultural
background.
4.1 Descriptive statistics of children’s academic
achievement
Education policies in Norway promote equal access for all members of the
community. Every child has the right to at least 13 years of free education
before deciding to enter the labour market or continue to higher education.
The first ten years of education are compulsory, and consist of primary (years
one to seven) and lower secondary (years eight to ten), while the next three
years (upper secondary) are optional (for more information, see the website of
The Norwegian Ministry of Education and Research (Ministry of Education
and Research 2009). The sample used in this paper consists of 499 pupils
undergoing lower secondary education. Of them, 388 are drawn from a
population of children in families with an income below 60 per cent of the
median income in 2000 (from now on the case sample) and 111 from a
general child population (from now on the control group). They are aged
from 13 to 15 years, and 35.5 per cent (177) of them are in their eighth year,
32.9 (164) in their ninth year and 31.7 per cent (158) in their tenth year of
schooling.
Academic achievement at school year eight and above is evaluated by
grades, ranging from six as the highest to one as the lowest. Our focus is on
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