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Socioeconomic status also influences Children's growth trajectory as they progress through their educational career.
Socioeconomic status also influences Children's growth trajectory as they progress through their educational career.
In his scholarly article “catching up or falling behind? Initial English Proficiency, concentrated Poverty, and the reading growth of language minority learners in the United States”, Kieffer found that, language minorities that begin kindergarten with English proficiency grew at a faster rate (and a similar rate to their non language minority counter parts) in reading comprehension than those who did not.
However, the students from lower socioeconomic background had growth trajectories “unfolding at a substantially lower elevation”.
However, the students from lower socioeconomic background had growth trajectories “unfolding at a substantially lower elevation”.
- Kieffer, 2008, p.861
This research implies that Socioeconomic status is such a prevalent force in literacy comprehension that, at times, it can aide kids of higher income families, even when they are disadvantaged in other areas. In this case, that disadvantage is being a language minority, or not having English as a first language.
According to Reardon, S. F., Valentino, R. A., & Shores, K. A. (2012), on average, students from low-income families enter high school about five years behind high-income students. This implies that the disparity is prevalent even in higher education and does not go away. Reardon proposes intervention in early grade levels to solve this problem.
However, Michael Keffer’s scholarly article, “Before and after third grade: Longitudinal evidence for the shifting role of socioeconomic status in reading growth” suggests alternate methods.
His main findings were
Despite scoring lower on initial reading tests, during Grades 1-3, students from lower socioeconomic families grew at a faster rate.
During grade 3-8, students from lower socioeconomic background grew at a slower rate. (Kieffer,2012)
This suggests that while intervention in early grade levels maybe in place around grades 1-3, they not as effective or maybe even put in place after the third grade.
This difference in viewpoints in Reardon and Kieffer might be due to the fact that Reardon’s article was written before Kieffer, and interventions might have started being in place after Reardon’s article but before Kieffer’s. (figure 1)
Figure 2: This growing problem is also prevalent in the latter parts of high school when juniors and seniors take their SATs score. The results show a correlation between socioeconomic status and student's academic performance.
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