Family Environments and Children's Academic Achievement: Sex and Social Group Differences

Summary

Regression surface analysis was used to examine sex group differences in relations between family environments and academic achievement at different levels of intellectual ability, for children from different Australian social groups. Models that examined possible linear, interaction, and curvilinear associations were used to generate the surfaces. Family environments were defined by parents' aspirations and by their instrumental and affective orientations. Included in the sample were families from lower-social-status Anglo-Australian (280 families), Greek (200 families), and Southern Italian (150 families) groups. Also, there were ISO Anglo-Australian middle-social-status families. Each family had an 11-year-old child and interviews with parents related to those children. The children completed tests of intellectual ability, word knowledge, word comprehension, and mathematics. Within social groups there were no sex-related differences in the environment and cognitive scores. However, the results indicated that changes in family environment scores, at different levels of intellectual ability, were related differentially to academic achievement for girls and boys from different social groups.