Balance in Covariates Before and After Matching between the Low Maternal Expectations Group and the High Maternal Expectations Group.

<p><i>Note</i>. Each standardized mean difference is obtained by: mean in the low expectation group minus mean in the high expectation group, divided by the standard deviation in the low expectation group.</p><p>¹Mahalanobis distance used.</p><p>²Exact matching used.</p><p>³The average absolute standardized mean difference is the average of the absolute values of standardized mean differences for all covariates.</p><p>Balance in Covariates Before and After Matching between the Low Maternal Expectations Group and the High Maternal Expectations Group.</p

Distributions of the propensity score.

<p>Treatment Units correspond to children with low maternal expectations whereas Control Units correspond to children with high maternal expectations. The left part of the figure shows the overlap between the Matched Treatment Units versus the Matched Control Units. The Unmatched Control Units correspond to children with high maternal expectations who were discarded from the analyses (note the high density of children with low propensity scores in this group, meaning that, given their characteristics, these children had a very low probability of having a mother with low expectations and thus represented poor matches). The right part of the figure represents the matching procedure when the discard Treatment Units option was used (see <i><a href="http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0119638#sec030" target="_blank">Discard option</a></i>, in the <i><a href="http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0119638#sec029" target="_blank">Complementary analyses</a></i> section): some Matched Treatment Units had a propensity score close to one, which made it hard to find equivalent Controls. As such, they were discarded in this complementary analysis and are plotted as Unmatched Treatment Units.</p

Demographic Characteristics of the Study Sample.

<p>Demographic Characteristics of the Study Sample.</p

Predicted percentages of failure to graduate from high school according to sex and maternal expectations.

<p>Predicted percentages of failure to graduate from high school according to sex and maternal expectations.</p