The family, neuroscience, and academic skills: An interdisciplinary account of social class gaps in children’s test scores

Abstract

Current explanations of social class gaps in children’s early academic skills tend to focus on non-cognitive skills that more advantaged children acquire in the family. Accordingly, social class matters because the cultural resources more abundant in advantaged families cultivate children’s repertories and tool kits, which allow them to more easily navigate social institutions, such as schools. Within these accounts, parenting practices matter for children’s academic success, but for seemingly arbitrary reasons. Alternatively, findings from current neuroscience research indicate that family context matters for children because it cultivates neural networks that assist in learning and the development of academic skills. That is, children’s exposure to particular parenting practices and stimulating home environments contribute to the growth in neurocognitive skills that affect later academic performance. We synthesize sociological and neuroscience accounts of developmental inequality by focusing on one such skill—fine motor skills—to illustrate how family context alters children’s early academic performance. Our findings support an interdisciplinary account of academic inequality, and extend current accounts of the family’s role in the transmission of social inequality.

Introduction

The transition into formal schooling is more than the start of children’s education; it is the initiation of a process that carries with it ramifications for the life-course (Entwisle et al., 2005). Yet, not all children reach the “starting gate” with similar skills (Lee and Burkham, 2002), and these inequalities are not randomly distributed but tend to coincide with groups in society, particularly along divisions of social class. Middle class children outperform their peers from working-class/poor families on most academic assessments at school entry (Cheadle, 2008, Lee and Burkham, 2002). These differences are often attributed to disparities in family resources, such as parenting practices and emphasis on education in the home environment that vary across social classes (Dumais, 2006, Duncan et al., 1994, Farkas, 2003, Heckman, 2006, Sui-Chu and Willms, 1996). However, missing from current sociological explanations is consideration of children’s neurocognitive functioning.

Many readers may find this claim confusing, since sociology tends to be concerned with social context and processes, thus the internal operations of the brain would seem to be outside the scope of the discipline. Yet, sociological ideas and principles have become increasingly prominent in neuroscience. Specifically, mounting cognitive neuroscience research on animals and humans indicates that “early life experience influences subsequent brain and cognitive function” (Farah et al., 2008, p. 793), and the brain’s development is in large part a product of social context (Diamond, 2000, Farah et al., 2008, Hackman et al., 2010, Heckman, 2006, Knudsen et al., 2006, Nelson et al., 2002). Although the specific factors that link social context to neural functioning are still relatively undefined, sociological concepts have become implicitly or explicitly a part of predominant neuroscience explanations of neurological development. But how does neuroscience fit into sociology? We propose that just as neuroscience explanations of human behavior are benefited from sociological insight, sociological explanations of inequality can be improved with the incorporation of ideas from neuroscience.

As mentioned above, contemporary accounts of class inequality in children’s early academic skills tend to focus on the family resources that cultivate certain cultural repertories or “tool kits” in middle class families, which benefit children at school and in life (Bodovski and Farkas, 2008, Cheadle, 2008, Lareau, 2002, Swidler, 1986). Middle-class parenting schemas and educational home environments are said to teach children the “rules of the game,” imbuing them with a particular type of cultural capital that allows them to more easily navigate social institutions. This same logic also suggests that such skills add to children’s evaluative worth without necessarily contributing to their cognitive skills (Lareau and Weininger, 2003). Current research therefore seems to imply that cultural capital acquired within the family matters but in rather arbitrary ways. What if children’s exposure to particular family resources did more than develop arbitrarily valued “cultural” tool kits, and instead, fostered skills that changed the neurocognitive structure of children’s brains? Incorporating neuroscience into current accounts of the intergenerational transmission of social inequality may provide the basis for redefining why parenting matters, and establish a more concrete link between early family experiences and children’s academic skills.

To examine the intersection of children’s family resources, neurocognitive functioning, and early academic inequality, we use data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study – Kindergarten cohort (ECLS-k) to link test score gaps at kindergarten entry with indicators of parenting practice and family context, and one aspect of neurocognitive functioning: fine motor skills. While “fine motor” may be a concept unfamiliar to sociologists, neuro-imaging techniques have been used to show that fine motor skills share neuroanatomical space with other skills that contribute to children’s cognitive learning, primarily executive function and attention (Diamond, 2000). This proximity to these other important aspects of learning suggests that fine motor may itself represent a particular skill that is important for understanding how children learn and account for differences in children’s academic ability (Cameron et al., 2012). We use ordinary least squares regression to show that children from more advantaged families have better fine motor skills than their less advantaged peers, and that a large portion of the disparity in children’s fine motor can be accounted for by differences in family resources (i.e., parenting practices and educational home environment). Moreover, controlling for fine motor skills helped account for a unique portion of the social class differences in children’s reading, math, and general knowledge test scores at kindergarten entry. Presented findings suggest that social class differences in parenting practices and family context improve children’s academic skills through more than the formation of refined cultural knowledge, tastes, and preferences, but through skills such as fine motor that reflect important developments in the brain. Results from this study thus extend current sociological explanations of the transmission of social inequality to include the role of neurocognitive functioning.