Project Details
Projekt
Development and Determinants of Student's Aspirations in Elementary School
Applicant
Dr. Florian Wohlkinger
Subject Area
Education Systems and Educational Institutions
Term
from 2017 to 2020
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 390744395
Already since the late 1960s, the close connection between social origin and educational aspirations is well documented, both for parents and their adolescent children (Sewell et al., 1969; Sewell et al., 1970). Since that time, educational aspirations have become an indispensable factor in research on educational inequalities. Nevertheless, the knowledge on how these educational aspirations emerge is quite crude - especially on the part of children and in younger age groups.So far, we know from qualitative research that already ten-year-old children have quite concrete ideas about their educational goals (Helsper et al., 2007). These are not a simple reproduction of their parents' position and play a significant role for the transition from elementary school into secondary school (ibid.). Furthermore, the relevance of children's school preferences for the choice of a secondary school type has also been confirmed with quantitative data analyses (Wohlkinger & Ditton, 2012; Wohlkinger, 2014). These results indicate that children significantly influence this early and fundamental decision on the course of their educational pathway - and therefore actively contribute to persistent social disparities.However, it is still entirely unclear how children at the stage of elementary school develop their educational goals. This 'blind spot' of research is even more surprising, as this topic is not only issue to a single scientific discipline, but is located at the intersection of different disciplines - pedagogy, educational psychology, developmental psychology, family sociology, childhood studies, and other sub-disciplines from the field of social sciences. Therefore, the main goal of this study is to extend the scarce knowledge on the development of educational aspirations of children. The main idea is to learn how differences in educational goals arise already in this early phase of education. By focusing on children's emerging aspirations at the beginning of their school career, a perspective that so far is largely ignored by educational inequality research and neighboring disciplines will be put into focus.
DFG Programme
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