Cultural Resources and School Success: Gender, Ethnicity, and Poverty Groups within an Urban School District

Social and behavioral skills and the gender gap in early educational achievement

“…Conduct-dependent grading would occur when teachers give better grades to students whose behavior conforms better to their expectations, net of their academic performance. This corresponds to what other scholars have termed "teacher bias" (Alexander et al, 1987;Farkas et al, 1990). …”

“…3 As further evidence of this bias, they find that social and behavioral skills affect academic achievement differently for boys and girls; in particular, they report that boys with poor conduct grades were more likely to be retained in first grade than were girls. This finding parallels Farkas et al (1990), who reported from their Southwestern City School District data that boys apparently suffered lower course grades for being disruptive, while girls did not.…”

“…When the feedback instead runs through a heightened ability to perform in a "socially-enhanced learning environment" that uses "well-rounded" academic evaluation criteria, the mechanism is the "cumulative exposure" form of a cumulative advantage process (DiPrete and Eirich, 2006). All three of these aspects, finally, factor into what Farkas et al (1990) referred to as the "double reward" for school attendance and work habits: social/behavioral skills can factor directly into the evaluation process because grading is conduct-dependent, indirectly because teachers grade based on "well-rounded" criteria, and indirectly because the typical classroom learning environment produces higher learning for students who have requisite conduct and work habits.…”

“…Just as Duncan, Featherman, and Duncan (1972) argued that the content of IQ came to be those skills which are most highly demanded in highstatus occupations, so Bowles and Gintis and later Bourdieu (1984) and Lareau (2003) argued that teachers and employers rewarded those whose socialization reproduced the cultural behaviors associated with the professional and upper classes. Farkas et al (1990) has shown that test scores and such noncognitive behaviors as student work habits, disruptiveness, and absenteeism almost completely explained differences in course grades by gender, race/ethnicity, and poverty status for middle school students. Rosenbaum (2001) made a similar demonstration that test scores and non-cognitive factors measured on high school seniors can explain most of the differences by gender, race/ethnicity and class in high school grades and subsequent educational attainment.…”

“…In 1990, Farkas et al (1990) could write about "teacher bias" as arising in part from teacher perceptions and in part from the effects of self-fulfilling prophecies on student performance. Teacher perceptual bias arose -they argued-when "teachers perceive lower levels of performance when evaluating poor, African-American or female students [emphasis ours], and give lower grades even when the students actual performance is no different from that of other children (p 128)."…”