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Educational attainment in developmental perspective: longitudinal analyses of continuity, change, and process.

Article Excerpt
From research, policy, and practical perspectives, it is of critical importance to identify socialization experiences that foster the development of early learning skills, academic achievement, and subsequent educational attainments. It is also important that we identity those experiences and personal characteristics that strengthen or weaken intergenerational continuity in educational attainments. Pursuit of this knowledge, within a developmental-ecological framework, requires sensitivity to possible cultural and ethnic group differences in the pathways leading to academic successes and failures and also requires recognition that the interplay among socioeconomic factors figures importantly in achievement and educational outcomes.

This special issue was assembled with the aims of advancing understanding of the processes through which educational attainments, broadly construed, develop across childhood and adolescence and the ways in which educational attainments are transmitted across generations. Research teams employed four prospective longitudinal data sets to address these aims. Two central questions cut across all four studies. The first is whether, and to what extent, parents' own education level predicts their offspring's academic skills, achievement orientations, and educational attainment. The second question concerns the role that socialization experiences with parents and peers play in these predictive relations. As will be seen, these experiences may serve both as main effect predictors and as mediators and moderators of socioecological factors, including parents' own educational attainments. The four empirical articles are followed by commentaries prepared by two prominent scholars whose contributions to theory and research bridge developmental science and educational practice.

Educational Attainment as a Social Address

Educational attainment is a critical factor in economic well-being and in the successful transition to adult roles and responsibilities. Family background characteristics, including parents' own educational attainment, consistently have been found to predict children's subsequent school performance and educational attainment (Davis-Kean, 2005; Haveman & Wolfe, 1995). These linkages often are explained in terms of social advantages such as educational opportunity, economic advantage, and family structure. Yet such social address explanations shed little light on the developmental processes in childhood and adolescence that may underlie intergenerational continuities and discontinuities in achievement and educational attainment (Hoff, Laursen, & Tardif, 2002). Family environment, children's relationships with parents and peers, and children's behavior and...

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