Two Forms of Social Inequality in Students' Socio-Emotional Skills: Do the Levels of Big Five Personality Traits and Their Associations With Academic Achievement Depend on Parental Socioeconomic Status?

Abstract

Some researchers and policymakers advocate a stronger focus on fostering socio-emotional skills in the hope of helping students to succeed academically, especially those who are socially disadvantaged. Others have cautioned that this might increase, rather than reduce, social inequality because personality traits conducive to achievement are themselves unevenly distributed in disfavor of socially disadvantaged students. Our paper contributes to this debate. Analyzing representative, large-scale data on 9,300 ninth graders from the German National Educational Panel Study (NEPS) and using the Big Five personality traits as a measure of socio-emotional skills, we cast light on two related yet distinct aspects of social inequality in socio-emotional skills: First, do levels of personality traits conducive to achievement vary as a function of students' parental socioeconomic status (pSES)? Second, do the returns to personality traits in terms of trait–achievement relations vary as function of pSES? Results showed that differences in Big Five traits between students with different pSES were small (0.04 ≤ |r| ≤ 0.09), especially when compared with pSES-related differences in cognitive skills (fluid intelligence) and sex-related differences in personality. The returns to Conscientiousness—the personality trait most relevant to achievement—in terms of its relations to academic achievement were higher in higher- vs. lower-SES students. Trait–achievement relations did not vary as a function of pSES for the other Big Five traits. Overall, both types of inequality were limited in magnitude. We discuss the implications of these findings for policy and practice and delineate directions for further research.

Fluid Intelligence and Competence Development in Secondary Schooling: No Evidence for a Moderating Role of Conscientiousness

“…In all our analyses, we controlled for the influence of a set of variables that prior research (e.g., Lechner et al 2021 ) has shown to be linked to both our predictors (i.e., fluid intelligence and conscientiousness) and outcomes (i.e., academic competencies), suggesting that these variables might act as confounders. These variables were participants’ gender (coded as 0 = male, 1 = female) and parental highest occupational prestige (HISEI; Ganzeboom 2010 ) with a possible value range between 11.56 and 88.96.…”

How School Climate Affects the Development of the Social and Emotional Skills of Underprivileged-Background Students—An Empirical Study Based on the SSES2019 Data

“…An experimental study on 33,000 sixth and seventh graders in Macedonia found that after a year of grit and self-regulation training, students from underprivileged backgrounds made more positive progress in social and emotional skills and academic achievements compared to students from average backgrounds [ 22 ]. This suggests that helping underprivileged-background students improve their social and emotional skills can alleviate the inequality in academic achievements caused by their families’ economic background, thereby promoting educational and social equity [ 11 ]. In recent years, some researchers have conducted studies on how to promote the development of the social and emotional skills of underprivileged-background students, and many believe that the adverse effects of an underprivileged socio-economic background on students can be moderated through the school climate [ 23 , 24 , 25 ].…”

“…Previous studies have shown that students’ families have an important influence on their growth [ 6 , 7 , 8 ] and that students from underprivileged family backgrounds tend to achieve poorer development than those from more advantaged family backgrounds [ 9 , 10 , 11 ]. Educational equity is a part of social equity, and educational equity in the modern sense should represent the separation of students’ achievements and their socio-economic background [ 12 , 13 ].…”

Machiavellianism and learning-related subjective well-being among Chinese senior high school students: A moderated mediation model

“…The result that the higher subjective economic level made learning-related subjective well-being more negatively associated with Machiavellianism, but more positively with gratitude, supported the resource amplification or "Matthew effect" hypothesis which holds that structural characteristics such as a higher socioeconomic status (SES, income is one important indicator of SES; Duncan et al, 2017) and individual characteristics coalesce in producing life outcomes (Walberg and Tsai, 1983) and were consistent with prior studies showing that the relationships between Conscientiousness and academic achievement were higher in higher-vs. lower-SES students (Brandt et al, 2020;Lechner et al, 2021).…”