Doris R. Entwisle

First grade and educational attainment by age 22 : A new story

Studies of the persistence of social stratification rely heavily on students’ experience in secondary schools. In this study, outcomes for a randomly selected panel of Baltimore children, followed from age 6 to age 22, demonstrate that first graders’ social contexts and personal resources explain educational attainment levels in early adulthood about as well as do similar resources measured in adolescence. Years of schooling and the highest level of school attempted respond most strongly to family SES, but parental psychological support and the child’s own temperament/disposition had substantial effects on first‐grade academic outcomes. The predictive power of race, gender, SES, and neighborhood quality measured in first grade on educational status at age 22 supports Lucas’s “effectively maintained inequality.”

Schools, Achievement, and Inequality: A Seasonal Perspective

Are there socioeconomic differences in the seasonality of children’s learning over the school year and summer months? The achievement gap across social lines increases during the primary grades, as much research indicates, but descriptive analyses and HLM within-person growth models for a representative panel of Baltimore school children demonstrate that the increase can be traced mainly to the out-of-school environment (i.e., influences situated in home and community). School-year verbal and quantitative achievement gains are comparable for upper socioeconomic status (SES) and lower SES children, but summer gains, when children are out of school, evidence large disparities. During the summer, upper SES children’s skills continue to advance (albeit at a slower rate than during the school year), but lower SES children’s gains, on average, are flat. This seasonal pattern of achievement gains implies that schooling plays an important compensatory role, one that is obscured when achievement is compared on an annual basis, as is typical. Policy implications of the seasonality of learning are discussed, including support for preventive measures over the preschool years and for programs, possibly including calendar reforms and summer school, to support disadvantaged children’s learning year-round.

Lasting Consequences of the Summer Learning Gap

Prior research has demonstrated that summer learning rooted in family and community influences widens the achievement gap across social lines, while schooling offsets those family and community influences. In this article, we examine the long-term educational consequences of summer learning differences by family socioeconomic level. Using data from the Baltimore Beginning School Study youth panel, we decompose achievement scores at the start of high school into their developmental precursors, back to the time of school entry in 1st grade. We find that cumulative achievement gains over the first nine years of childrens schooling mainly reflect school-year learning, whereas the high SES-low SES achievement gap at 9th grade mainly traces to differential summer learning over the elementary years. These early out-of-school summer learning differences, in turn, substantially account for achievement-related differences by family SES in high school track placements (college preparatory or not), high school noncompletion, and four-year college attendance. We discuss implications for understanding the bases of educational stratification, as well as educational policy and practice.

Facilitating the Transition to First Grade: The Nature of Transition and Research on Factors Affecting It.

In this article we describe the nature of the first-grade transition and summarize several studies that have investigated how childrens schooling proceeds over this period. Drawing on Beginning School Study data that include childrens marks and test scores plus information about their parents and schools, we carried out a longitudinal study of a large random sample (N = 790) of children who began first grade in Baltimore in 1982. We studied effects on the transition for children attending full-day rather than half-day kindergarten, of living in different kinds of family arrangements, and of several other circumstances. We found that children with more kindergarten, those whose families included coresident grandmothers, and those who did not change schools between kindergarten and first grade did better over the transition, other things being equal. We close with a list of implications for practice based on what is known about the first-grade transition and offer suggestions for future research.

When expectations work: race and socioeconomic differences in school performance

Why are expectations for future performance realized more often by some people than by others, and why are such differences in the efficacy of performance expectations socially patterned? We hypothesize that differences in attentiveness to performance feedback may be relevant, reasoning that follow-through behaviors will be less well conceived when expectations are formed without regard to evaluation of previous performance. Using data from Baltimore fourth-grade students and their parents, we find that expectations anticipate marks more accurately when recall of prior marks is correct than when it is incorrect. Because errors of recall (mostly on the high side) are more common among lower-SES and minority children and their parents, their school performance is affected most strongly. Research on school attainment processes from a motivational perspective must give more attention to the additional resources that facilitate successful goal attainment, given high expectations. Our perspective focuses on resources internal to the individual, but external constraints also are important. The discussion stresses the need for further work in both areas

Lasting effects of elementary school.

The causes of long-term continuity in the level of childrens school performance are not completely understood. Some of the continuity undoubtedly stems from the persistence of cognitive status. But this article, which reports on a follow-up study of schoolchildren in Baltimore, shows that it can also be related to the childs early social environment. That is, the influences of parents and teachers on children in Grades 1-3 were linked to the childrens reading and mathematics performance four to nine years later. The reasons for this persistence are explored, including the maintenance of higher achievement levels originally fostered by teachers and parents, the continuance of a pattern of social dependence, and the reliance of parents and teachers on the childs cumulative record.

Children in Motion: School Transfers and Elementary School Performance

Abstract Moves from one school to another are a common, yet generally neglected, challenge to childrens orderly school adjustment over the beginning-school transition. School transfers were traced...

Winter Setback: The Racial Composition of Schools and Learning to Read

This is a longitudinal study of the growth in reading comprehension over the first two years of school among a mixed-race random sample of children in Baltimore, Maryland. African-Americans in integrated schools made less progress in reading comprehension in winter when school was in session than did their counterparts in segregated schools. In summers, however, when they were not in school, the African-American children who attended integrated schools gained considerably more than their counterparts who attended segregated schools. White children made about the same progress in reading in integrated and segregated schools in winters and summers, even though the whites in integrated schools came from more educationally advantaged families. Thus, children of both races in integrated schools, who generally came from more educated families, did not make the expected gains in reading comprehension when school was open. In summers, however, students whose parents had more education forged ahead of those whose parents were high school dropouts. We consider several explanations for the relatively slow growth in reading comprehension we observedfor children in integrated schools. It is most likely that acquisition of reading skills is harder for youngsters of both races in integrated schools because their language backgrounds differ. Early reading development depends heavily on a childs knowledge of spoken language, which for Baltimore children reflects their experience in segregated neighborhoods. At the same time, schools seem to help the children from economically disadvantaged homes-the ones who need help the most.

The syntactic-paradigmatic shift in children's word associations

Summary Association to 24 high-frequency words by 500 children have been tabulated. The response words were classified both as to form-class and according to a syntactic-paradigmatic dichotomy. There is a definite shift from a syntactic response to a paradigmatic response that is most pronounced between ages 6 and 8. The correspondence between our results and results of others who used different kinds of analyses is apparent.

Warming Up, Cooling Out, or Holding Steady? Persistence and Change in Educational Expectations after High School.

This article examines the expectation to complete a bachelors degree among a predominantly low-income, mainly African American, panel of Baltimore youths at the end of high school, at age 22, and at age 28. Across this time, stability is the modal pattern, but when expectations change, declines are more frequent than increases. Although disadvantaged youths and those with limited academic resources from high school are the most prone to give up the expectation to complete college, both factors recede in importance during the transition to adulthood when postsecondary enrollment becomes more salient. Clarks “cooling-out” thesis and Rosenbaum,s “college-for-all” thesis predict a downward leveling of ambition, especially among youths with high expectations and limited resources and those who attend two-year colleges. The results indicate, however, that the expectations of low-resource youths are not distinctively cooled out by the college experience, and, net of other considerations, two-year college attendance is associated more with warming up than with cooling out. Hence, the dynamics proposed by Clark and Rosenbaum do not adequately account for changes in college expectations over the years after high school. A broader framework, situated in life-course ideas, is recommended.