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

points, controlling for the other variables. In the following paragraphs, we
explore coefficients of some dummy sets. Furthermore, we use the estimated
regression equation to predict the expected levels of the grades for the pupils.
4.2.1 Gender
Gender is among the essential analytical dimensions in social education
research. In the Norwegian context, studies show that girls achieved better
results than boys do in basic school. Anders Bakken (2008), for example, in
his study of gender differences at basic school, found that girls do on average
better than boys. Breaking down the same analysis by minority (immigrant)
background, he found gender variation to be lower. Further, he analysed
gender differences with relation to parental education level. In this analysis
he found gender differences in academic achievement among pupils whose
parent have not completed secondary level education to be higher than
among pupils whose parents had a university degree (Bakken 2008). The
data set used in this study shows clear gender variation in term of pupils’
results in individual subjects (Kristofersen 2008). In terms of the total sum of
the three subjects, the result is shown by multivariate analysis. The
coefficient of the gender dummy variable shows that the girls achieve better
results than boys by about 0.47 points. With a t-value of 2.2, this result is
also significantly larger than zero.
4.2.2 Parents’ Education
The education coefficients are positive, indicating that a pupil whose parents’
education level is not registered is expected to show a lower performance
than others. This pattern is significantly identified. Those whose parents
have basic education only do not differ significantly from those whose
parents’ education is unregistered, but apart from that, the coefficient values
increase with increasing educational level. This confirms the positive
association between parent’s education level and children’s performance,
which was demonstrated by bivariate methods earlier in the paper. Figure
(10) illustrates this result and shows the effect of parental education on
children’s achievement, controlling for other factors.
– Parents’ socioeconomic status and children’s academic performance – 45