Overcoming the odds : investigating the moderating role of child attributes in the relationship between socioeconomic status and academic achievement

• Main Author: Chua, Hong Lin
• Other Authors: Ho Moon-Ho Ringo
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: Nanyang Technological University 2021
• Subjects: Social sciences::Psychology
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/148909
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Although children of low socioeconomic status (SES) tend to perform poorer academically vis-à-vis their high-SES peers, the SES-achievement gap is not definite. Several factors, such as individual adaptive attributes, familial support and community support, were found to interact with SES to mitigate the SES-achievement gap. Since previous research have mostly focused on the role of family and the community, it may be valuable to dive deeper into the role of individual child attributes. Previous studies have hinted at the possibility of effortful control and theory of mind being moderators of the SES-achievement relationship. However, literature in this area remains scant, especially in the Asian context. The current study serves as a preliminary examination of the relationships between SES, academic achievement, effortful control, and theory of mind. Specifically, this study investigated the relationship between SES and children’s academic achievement, and subsequently examined the moderating role of effortful control and theory of mind in the SES-achievement relationship. Tapping on the database of a larger study, robust regression analyses were conducted with a final sample of 404 Primary 1 children. After taking into account the effect of control variables like gender, ethnicity, and prior academic achievement, SES was significantly and positively associated with academic achievement in language, but not mathematics. Furthermore, contrary to our expectations, no significant moderating effects were found for effortful control and theory of mind. The lack of significant findings, together with key implications and limitations of this study, are discussed in this paper.