Maternal education,home environment and chinese primary school children’s academic performance: Longitudinal follow-up results

Abstract

This paper reports a follow up analysis of longitudinal date. We (1) examined urban Chinese mothers’ occupations as a function of their educational levels, (2) tested mediating effects of home environment variables after fine-tuning key variables of maternal education and home environment by excluding data that were provided by the children’s fathers, and (3) tested if home environment variables mattered differently for academic performance in the first grade, second grade, and changes the children’s grade. Data on maternal education level (Group 1: No More than Junior High School; Group 2: High School; Group 3: At Least College), maternal occupation and 12 home environment variables were directly obtained from urban mothers in January of 2019 (Time 1; N = 231); data on academic performance were directly obtained from the children’s school in February (Time 1; N = 231) and then in October of 2019 (Time 2; N = 226). We found partial support for our earlier speculation that mothers in Group 1 and Group 2 were similarly positioned on the job market. Similar to our earlier finding, we found that children whose mothers were in Group 3 outperformed their peers in academic performance but children from the first two groups performed similarly. In both times, the link between maternal education and children’s academic performance was mediated by some home environment variables such as number of children’s books at home. However, the role of home environment variables in the link between maternal education and children’s academic performance is complex and may vary with time.