Parental environment and student achievement: Does a Matthew effect exist?

TL;DR

This study examines how parental education and effort influence children's academic achievement across subjects, revealing subject-specific patterns in the persistence and growth of these effects from ages 8 to 15.

Contribution

It provides new empirical evidence on the causal impact of parental environment and the presence of a Matthew effect across different school subjects.

Findings

Parental environment positively correlates with better student performance.

The Matthew effect varies by subject, diminishing in math, forming a bell curve in literature, and increasing in English.

Results highlight the social dimension in foreign language learning.

Abstract

This paper investigates the causal impact of the parental environment on the student's academic performance in mathematics, literature and English (as a foreign language), using a new database covering all children aged 8 to 15 of the Madrid community, from 2016 to 2019. Parental environment refers here to the parents' level of education (i.e. the skills they acquired before bringing up their children), and parental investment (the effort made by parents to bring up their children). We distinguish the persistent effect of the parental environment from the so-called Matthew effect, which describes a possible tendency for the impact of the parental environment to increase as the child grows up. Whatever the subject (mathematics, literature or English), our results are in line with most studies concerning the persistent effect: a favourable parental environment goes hand in hand with better results for the children. As regards the Matthew effect, the results differ between subjects: while the impact of the parental environment tends to diminish from the age of 8 to 15 in mathematics, it forms a bell curve in literature (first increasing, then decreasing) and increases steadily in English. This result, which is encouraging for mathematics and even literature, confirms the social dimension involved in learning a foreign language compared to more academic subjects.