Inequality in the Early Cognitive Development of British Children in the 1970 Cohort
Inequality in the Early Cognitive Development of British Children in the 1970 Cohort
Key takeaways
Bibliography: Feinstein, L., 2003. Inequality in the Early Cognitive Development of British Children in the 1970 Cohort. Economica 70, 73–97. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-0335.t01-1-00272
Authors:: Leon Feinstein
Tags: #Cognitive-Ability, #BCS
Collections:: BCS
First-page: 1
This paper uses the 1970 cohort to develop an index of development for 1292 UK children assessed at 22, 42, 60 and 120 months. The paper discusses the importance of these early scores as measures of human capital formation and argues that they can provide insights for growth or labour economists as well as those concerned with social equity. Position in the distribution of this index at 22 months (in 1972/3) is shown to predict final educational qualifications at age 26 (1996). The position at 22 months is shown to be related to family background. However, the children of educated or wealthy parents who scored poorly in the early tests, had a tendency to catch up whereas children of worse off parents who scored poorly were extremely unlikely to catch up and are clearly shown to be an at-risk group. As children mature and do more discriminating tests, the family background association strengthens.
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Reading notes
Imported on 2024-05-07 20:06
⭐ Important
- & The paper discusses the importance of these early scores as measures of human capital formation and argues that they can provide insights for growth or labour economists as well as those concerned with social equity (p. 1)
- & Position in the distribution of this index at 22 months (in 1972/3) is shown to predict final educational qualifications at age 26 (1996). The position at 22 months is shown to be related to family background. However, the children of educated or wealthy parents who scored poorly in the early tests, had a tendency to catch up whereas children of worse off parents who scored poorly were extremely unlikely to catch up and are clearly shown to be an at-risk group. (p. 1)
- & Liaw et al. (1994), for example, show that “at risk factors”, such as family mental health or problem behaviours related to poverty, influence the IQ of children as young as age three. Klebanov et al. (1998) show that these risk factors influence the development of North American one-year olds and that, moreover, poverty significantly affects children by age two. By age three, even neighbourhood effects have played a significant role. (p. 1)
- & In order to maximise the information available at each age while reducing the number of dependent variables, test scores at each age were combined by principal components analysis (p. 6)
- & Recently Jensen [1998] has claimed that the g-Factor is a biological phenomenon and, crucially, that, therefore, individual and population (i.e. race) differences are a function of evolutionary processes. Jensen shows that psychometric g has direct biological correlates with brain size, brain evoked potentials, nerve conduction velocity, and the brain's glucose metabolic rate during cognitive activity. However, there is far from general agreement among neurologists that the science has evolved sufficiently to support the claim that these variables can be invoked as an explanation of g, or that g is, therefore, a biological variable (p. 7)
- & firstly, that there were significant differences in the educational performance of children from different social groups in these data, even at 22 months. (p. 23)
- & Second, performance in tests of ability at 22 months are correlated with ultimate schooling outcomes at age 26. (p. 23)
- & Third, family background plays a large role in influencing the mobility of children within the distributions of ability at different ages (p. 23)