Testing for SES differences in the responsiveness of educational expectations in a twin design

PLOS ONE RESEARCH ARTICLE Testing for SES differences in the responsiveness of educational expectations in a twin design Mirko Ruks ID* Faculty of Sociology, Bielefeld University, Bielefeld, Germany * a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 OPEN ACCESS Citation: Ruks M (2023) Testing for SES differences in the responsiveness of educational expectations in a twin design. PLoS ONE 18(8): e0290454. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal. pone.0290454 Editor: Keith Leverett Warren, The Ohio State University, UNITED STATES Received: March 22, 2023 Accepted: August 8, 2023 Published: August 24, 2023 Copyright: © 2023 Mirko Ruks. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Data Availability Statement: The full TwinLife data can be downloaded via the GESIS portal at https:// doi.org/10.4232/1.13987. Funding: The preparation of this manuscript was supported by funding by the German Research Foundation (grant number: 220286500), awarded to Martin Diewald, Rainer Riemann and Frank M. Spinath. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Competing interests: The author has declared that no competing interests exist. Abstract In this article I test whether students’ educational expectations respond to prior academic performance and whether this responsiveness varies by socio-economic status (SES). The responsiveness of high-SES students’ expectations may be lower as suggested by the compensatory advantage mechanism or higher because of alienation processes of low-SES students. However, the association between achievement and expectations may be in part spurious because of unobserved social and genetic confounders. This issue is largely ignored by previous research. Therefore, in this paper I estimate behavioral genetic twin models that take into account the possible confounding of the responsiveness of expectations to performance by unobserved genetic and social influences. While students’ expectations respond to prior performance, this responsiveness is reduced by more than half once unobserved genetic and social confounders are accounted for. Also, SES differences in responsiveness to performance are completely accounted for by high-SES students’ expectations being less responsive to prior levels of cognitive ability. So, this study shows the relevance of taking different types of confounding into account when studying the formation of educational expectations. Introduction Inequality of educational opportunity (IEO), defined as “differences in level of educational attainment according to social background” [1] is a well documented phenomenon in social inequality research [2]. However, it’s mechanisms are still not fully understood. Previous research conceptualizes educational expectations as the “strategic center” of the educational attainment process [3]. Indeed, despite of rising educational expectations over time [4], students’ expectations are a strong predictor of educational success [5–7]. Given this relevance of educational expectations for educational attainment, it is important to understand how expectations are formed. One part of the research asks how students’ expectations respond to signals of academic potential [8–10] and whether this responsiveness varies by socio-economic status [11, 12]. On the one hand, high-SES students may be less responsive as a high SES can compensate for prior bad performance [13]. On the other hand, high-SES students may be more responsive as low-SES students may anticipate their possible educational failure or feel PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0290454 August 24, 2023 1 / 18 PLOS ONE SES differences in the responsiveness of educational expectations in a twin design culturally alienated from educational institutions, decoupling their expectations from any signal of academic potential [12]. Following this line of research, in this study I investigate whether students’ expectations respond to prior academic performance and whether this responsiveness varies by SES. However, the relationship between academic performance and expectations may be partly biased by unobserved social or genetic factors. On the one hand, there are social factors at the family level, such as family SES, school composition or neighborhood context, that have an effect on students’ expectations [3, 14, 15] and are also related to academic performance [16–18], thus possibly confounding the observed association. On the other hand, there is robust evidence of genetic influences on academic performance [19] and there are also genetic influences on educational expectations [20] which can be explained by an adjustment of expectations based on genetically influenced traits. As genetic dispositions related to cognitive and educational outcomes also have an effect on educational expectations [21], there is a risk of genetic confounding of the association of expectations and performance. So, in light of the possible confounding due to unobserved social and genetic factors, it is crucial to control for these confounders when studying the formation of expectations. While there are some studies using panel data to apply more robust methods for causal inference [12, 22, 23], so far no study of the formation of educational expectations has explicitly controlled for social and genetic confounding. The main contribution of this study is to address this issue by controlling not only for unobserved social and genetic confounders but also for cognitive ability as one important observed confounder. Using panel data (N = 1033 twin pairs, age 10–14) from the German TwinLife study [24], I estimate biometric ACE-beta twin models [25] that control for social and genetic confounding by estimating these confounders as latent variables within the model, providing an direct estimate of social and genetic confounding. To control for these types of confounding is crucial as they may not only affect the estimates of the responsiveness of educational expectations to academic performance but also of the SES differences of this responsiveness. Theoretical background Educational expectations can be distinguished from educational aspirations. Both are “prefigurative orientations composed of specific beliefs about one’s future trajectory” [26]. Aspirations are conceptualized as unconstrained idealistic goals [26] referring to “the level of education that an individual would ideally like to obtain” [27], while expectations refer to more realistic beliefs that take into account the subjective probability of success [27]. Different to aspirations, expectations are more responsive to indicators of academic potential in particular and the educational opportunity structure in general [27] and are more (...truncated)