Family Background and Its Impact on Children's Academic Performance

This paper primarily examines the interrelationships connecting family background and students’ academic attainment. Based on the questionnaire survey conducted in 6 senior high schools in Harbin, the capital of Heilongjiang Province in northeast China, the sample consists of 2028 senior high school freshman.The findings suggest that the differentiation of social stratification between families in senior high school education is embodied in student’s academic attainment. The advantaged classes (such as the administrator group, the middle- manager group, and professionals and technicians group) contain significantly larger resources in economic capital, cultural capital, and parents’ emotional involvement in education than the disadvantaged (such as blue-collar worker group, skilled industrial worker group, and peddler group), which indirectly affects students’ performance in exams. A further analysis indicates the way how family structured variables, including family’s cultural capital, economic capital affect the academic achievement. Besides, this paper explores the extent to which family process variables, including parental educational expectation, family interaction, parents’ emotional engagement in education, and behavior supervision, have power to predict academic achievement between different classes.