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Too Much of a Good Thing? Gender, ‘Concerted Cultivation’ and Unequal Achievement in Primary Education

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Abstract

It is well established that cultural and economic resources imparted to children vary significantly by social class. Literature on concerted cultivation has highlighted the way out-of-school activities can reproduce social inequalities in the classroom. Within this literature however, little attention has been given to the role of gender in concerted cultivation. In this paper, we use data from the first wave of the Growing Up in Ireland longitudinal study to consider how both social class and gender influence the out-of-school activities of children. Moreover, we examine how out-of-school activities, class and gender impact on children’s school engagement and academic achievement. We find that while childrearing logics tend to operate within social class categories, there is an additional cultural aspect of gender in the uptake of different types of out-of-school activities. Our findings suggest the need to move beyond explanations of concerted cultivation to explain gender differences in mathematics and reading attainment.

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Notes

  1. The authors of the report argue that the lack of a significant relationship may be due to the relatively small sample size used or due to the focus of the study which is on a low SES community.

  2. The results also show a relationship between participation in structured or organised out-of-school activities and the time children spend travelling from school—with lower levels of participation in cultural activities and clubs among children spending longer periods of time (typically more than 30 minutes per day) travelling home from school.

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Acknowledgement

Growing Up in Ireland data have been funded by the Government of Ireland through the Office of the Minister for Children and Youth Affairs; have been collected under the Statistics Act, 1993, of the Central Statistics Office. The project has been designed and implemented by the joint ESRI-TCD Growing Up in Ireland Study Team. © Department of Health and Children

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McCoy, S., Byrne, D. & Banks, J. Too Much of a Good Thing? Gender, ‘Concerted Cultivation’ and Unequal Achievement in Primary Education. Child Ind Res 5, 155–178 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12187-011-9118-2

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