Peers, Parents, and Attitudes about School

Abstract

Educational attitudes are an important component of adolescent development linked to long-term educational success and as a component of noncognitive skills. This study focuses on peer and parent roles in shaping adolescent attitude development. First, I explore the relationship between an adolescent and their friends' attitudes and whether this influence is heterogeneous. Second, I ask whether parents can moderate the friend effect. I find that adolescents with poor attitudes and whose friends have particularly poor attitudes are especially at risk of developing low educational attitudes and that working with parents can serve as a channel to decrease the risk. (JEL C31, I21, Z13)

Rurality, socio‐economic disadvantage and educational mobility: A Scottish case study

“…Another body of evidence finds that pupils from disadvantaged neighbourhoods experience worse school outcomes and social mobility (Chetty et al, 2014; Cutler & Glaeser, 1997; Gibson & Asthana, 1998; Sammons et al, 2015) and moving to lower‐poverty areas improves the chances of HE attendance, especially if the move happens early on in life (Chetty et al, 2016). In addition, parents can mitigate peers' and communities' influence (Agostinelli et al, 2020; Norris, 2020). Poverty, however, is not the only environmental feature affecting educational gains.…”

Peer Gender and Schooling: Evidence from Ethiopia

“…These features include the consequences of class size (Angrist and Lavy, 1999;Angrist et al, 2019;Chetty et al, 2011;Krueger and Whitmore, 2001), teacher quality (Chetty, Friedman, and Rockoff, 2014;Rothstein, 2017), effects of tracking by initial achievement conditional on teacher incentives (Duflo, Dupas, and Kremer, 2011), and peer effects over a range of dimensions. These peer dimensions include the long-run negative effect on earnings from exposure to disruptive peers (Carrell, Hoekstra, and Kuka, 2018), extensive non-linearities in peer ability effects, a positive link between low-achieving Kindergarten peers and non-cognitive skills (Bietenbeck, 2020) and between academic achievement and peers' persistence (Golsteyn, Non, and Zölitz, 2020), positive spillovers from friends' educational aspirations (Gagete-Miranda, 2020;Norris, 2020), and the effects of a variety of peer compositions on educational attainment.…”

Peer Gender and Schooling: Evidence from Ethiopia

“…These features include the consequences of class size (Angrist and Lavy, 1999;Angrist et al, 2019;Chetty et al, 2011;Krueger and Whitmore, 2001), teacher quality (Chetty, Friedman, and Rockoff, 2014;Rothstein, 2017), effects of tracking by initial achievement conditional on teacher incentives (Duflo, Dupas, and Kremer, 2011), and peer effects over a range of dimensions. These peer dimensions include the long-run negative effect on earnings from exposure to disruptive peers (Carrell, Hoekstra, and Kuka, 2018), extensive non-linearities in peer ability effects, a positive link between low-achieving Kindergarten peers and non-cognitive skills (Bietenbeck, 2020) and between academic achievement and peers' persistence (Golsteyn, Non, and Zölitz, 2020), positive spillovers from friends' educational aspirations (Gagete-Miranda, 2020;Norris, 2020), and the effects of a variety of peer compositions on educational attainment.…”