Cultural Capital and Educational Attainment

According to Bourdieu’s theory of cultural reproduction, children from middle class families are advantaged in gaining educational credentials due to their possession of cultural capital. In order to assess this theory, I have developed a broad operationalisation of the concept of cultural capital, and have surveyed pupils on both their own and their parents ’ cultural capital. I will conclude that cultural capital is transmitted within the home and does have a significant effect on performance in the GCSE (General Certificate of Secondary Education) examinations. However, a large, direct effect of social class on attainment remains when cultural capital has been controlled for. Therefore, ‘cultural reproduction ’ can provide only a partial explanation of social class differences in educational attainment

Students as Rational Decision-Makers: The Question of Beliefs and Attitudes

Rational choice theorists have analysed rates of participation in post-compulsory education, and, in particular, class differentials in these rates. Various claims have been made about the motivations of student decision-makers, but these claims have not been grounded empirically. This paper will assess the question of whether students’ attitudes to education and beliefs about their own academic abilities vary according to social background and gender. Evidence is presented that students’ attitudes to education do not vary greatly according to gender or social background, but that both the social background and gender of students affect their perception of their own abilities

Cultural Capital, Cultural Knowledge and Ability

Bourdieu\'s theory of cultural reproduction has been interpreted in various ways, and several authors have criticised an overly narrow interpretation of cultural capital as simply consisting of \'beaux arts\' participation. For researchers, this raises the challenge of developing a broader interpretation of cultural capital which is still specific enough to be operationalised. This paper discusses the ways in which parents may transmit educational advantage to their children through cultural rather than economic means, and the forms of knowledge and skill which may be considered as \'cultural capital\'. An operationalisation of cultural knowledge is discussed, and empirical evidence is presented on differences in levels of cultural knowledge between the children of graduates and non-graduates.[No keywords]

Single-sex Schooling and Academic Attainment at School and through the Lifecourse

This paper examines the impact of single-sex schooling on a range of academic outcomes for a sample of British people born in 1958. In terms of the overall level of qualifications achieved, we find that single-sex schooling is positive for girls at age 16, but neutral for boys, while at later ages, single-sex schooling is neutral for both sexes. However, we find that single-sex schooling is linked to the attainment of qualifications in gender-atypical subject areas for both sexes, not just during the school years, but also later in life

The presidential election of 1920

Thesis (M.A.)--Boston Universit

Evaluation of stories children like or dislike in the first grade basal reader 'Down our street'.

Thesis (Ed.M.)--Boston Universit

Geometry on all prime Three Manifolds

The point of this work is to construct geometric structures on the oriented closed prime three-manifolds that don't at present already have them. One knows these compound prime three-manifolds, have canonically up to deformation from the identity, incompressible torus walls whose complementary components are diffeomorphic to "elemental" prime three-manifolds carrying single Thurston geometries. These geometric elementary parts have finite volume or linear volume growth. This metric geometry is generalized here to Lie geometry meaning an open cover by special coordinate charts in a model space whose transition mappings are related by one of several finite dimensional Lie groups acting on the model space. The Lie group is allowed to vary in a constrained manner from region to region in the manifold. Our geometric version of torus wall crossing after fixing finitely many parameters is rigid using covering spaces, pushouts, and sliding flat toroidal cylinders rigidly together. A new concept, Lie generated geometry, describes abstractly what these constructions produce. These Lie generated geometries are determined by special coordinate chart coverings as suggested above, but structurally they consist of sheaves of germs of charts into the upper half space which are related by four Lie groups acting there. The key point beside the Lie group generating system is that each germ of the structure can be analytically continued along any path, like solving a classical ODE in the complex plane. This defines for each Lie geometrized manifold a developing map of its universal cover into upper half space. The Theorem solves a 44 year old question from a 1976 Princeton math department preprint motivated by the Poincar\'{e} Conjecture and finally documented in the 1983 reference of Thurston and the second author