It has been shown in research that there is a relationship between a child’s family’s socioeconomic status and their cognitive development. It has been found in past research that there is a negative relationship between low socioeconomic status and the cognitive development of a child in that they lag behind their peers from higher socioeconomic backgrounds in phonemic awareness, reading skills and mathematical skills. Personally, I am interested in this subject because I had two field placements during my undergraduate in education in schools in which the students were from low socioeconomic households. I found that these students were lagging behind their peers from higher socioeconomic backgrounds that I had previously taught. I also noticed that most of the students were not from a traditional nuclear family but were either in single parent households and in many cases the child was in the foster care system. Another area of interest for this research paper would be to discover if there are any longitudinal studies on this topic. Thus far the articles that I have examined only discuss the effect socioeconomic status has on school performance in primarily elementary students and more specifically prior to grade four. I would be interested in trying to determine if it has been shown that socioeconomic status has a long lasting effect on a child’s school success or if they catch up to their more affluent peers in high school.
I believe this research topic is relevant to the topic of sociology in the family because as nuclear families become less common and the rate of divorce and single parent households increases the amount of students coming from lower socioeconomic classes may increase. Also, with the crash of the economy the rate of families who are facing economical difficulties has also increased. I believe it is important to study whether this decrease in financial resources for families will have a negative effect on children’s success in school.
This is a very interesting topic. In the past, I've had experience with courses that have discussed the effects of the built environment on quality of life (with the question of whether health improves when environment is changed). I wonder if income is less important than status? Income may signify a lack of parental presence or involvement or poor access to resources, but not necessarily. Status, such as privileges for example, and the overall devaluing of certain groups/individuals, may have a more negative impact on cognitive ability than financial resources. Just some thoughts.. This is a great topic--wish I had thought of it!
ReplyDeleteExpanding on Sarah's comment, it would also be interesting to look at the broader social network from which these students emerge, such as the literacy rates of their parents/guardians which would perhaps indicate a generational effect.
ReplyDeleteTo perhaps create a comparison, I would suggest looking at the educational progress of students who have been taken out of their lower socioeconomic household and placed within a different social network. For example, in the United States they have a program called ABC (A Better Chance) which moves kids from "disadvanted" backgrounds to "good" schools and places them in essentially boarding homes. It would be interesting to look at their educational progress compared to other children at their school as well as analyzing their views on family, the role of parents, how their boarding schools may function as a family, etc.
Good luck!