Asta Breinholt

Statistical discrimination theory suggests that discrimination arises when gatekeepers lack individual-level information and therefore draw on their beliefs on the group-level. According to this perspective, the policy solution is straight forward: provide gatekeepers with accurate individual-level information and discrimination will cease. One such area for intervention is teachers’ grading of students’ academic skills. Previous studies find that teachers exhibit negative grading bias against boys, ethnically and racially minoritized students, and students of parents with short educations so these groups receive signals about lower academic potential than merited. We test whether grading bias stems from statistical discrimination using Danish administrative registers on ninth grade students (N∼400,000) during 2008–2014. First, we leverage the introduction in 2010 of standardized national tests in Danish reading in eighth grade as a natural experiment: teachers were given individual-level information, and we analyse whether this information mitigates grading bias in ninth grade. We further test whether grading bias stems from statistical discrimination by analysing the role of the performance of a given social background group at the same school the year prior. We find substantial grading bias in Danish reading against boys, ethnically minoritized students, and students of non-university-educated parents and in written mathematics against boys and students of non-university educated parents but conclude that statistical discrimination is not likely to play a major role. Hence, our study suggests that other types of discrimination may account for grading bias.

This article expands Bronfenbrenner’s bioecological model by integrating biological and ecological processes—particularly microbial life—into its core concept of proximal processes. Drawing on host–microbiome research and the concept of the child-as-ecosystem, we reconceptualize the developing person as a multispecies being embedded within nested ecological systems. Through four interdisciplinary encounters—spanning social stratification, family separation, socialisation, and environmental health—we demonstrate how microbial diversity and ecological entanglements shape children’s development, well-being, and learning. We argue that BEM’s human-centered framework must evolve to reflect multispecies interdependencies and ecological realities, especially in the context of biodiversity loss and climate change. This rethinking has direct implications for early childhood education, research, and policy, offering a more ecologically attuned model of development.

All bodies—child, animal, plant—are bodies sustained by life processes. Human as well as animal and plant bodies coexist with a multiplicity of microbial life. As symbiotic partners, human bodies are ecosystems of microbial life in a microbial world. In this way, microbes cannot simply be seen as disease-causing and human bodies as hosts of human-only life. Simplistic notions of the child as a unitary and social subject and the image of the agentic child are both questioned by this view. What if we considered for childhood studies the body’s microbial constitution in a bacterial world? How would everyday life unfold as a more-than-human sociality in which children act, think, and feel on a daily basis? In this conversation article, seven multidisciplinary scholars address the following questions by grounding their responses in their respective fields, in childhood, and in their research interests: How do microbes and childhood matter in your research? Consider how the understanding of microbes as foundational for life influences your field of research. How does your research seek to engage the biosocial imagination and the challenge of integrating biological and social understandings of the child in fruitful and robust ways? How do considerations of microbes and childhood bring together multidisciplinary engagements?

Recent research shows that high parental socioeconomic status does not convey the same skill advantage to Black and Latinx children as to white children in the United States due to disadvantages at school for racialised and ethnicised minorities. We extend this literature by asking whether socioeconomic status moderates the association between child genotype and cognitive skills among racialised and ethnicised minorities in the United States. Hence, what we study is whether high socioeconomic status conveys an equal advantage when it comes to the relationship between genotype and cognitive skills. We use data from the Future of Families and Child Wellbeing Study. Using molecular genetic data, we construct a polygenic index for educational attainment and test whether the association between this index and children’s cognitive skills is moderated by maternal education and household income in two principal component defined ancestry groups: African ancestries (n=1,551) and Latinx ancestries (n=890). The polygenic index for educational attainment is positively associated with cognitive skills in both groups. In the African ancestries group, this association does not differ by socioeconomic status. In the Latinx ancestries group, the results are mixed. Because our samples are likely underpowered to detect genotype-socioeconomic interactions, our results should be considered suggestive until larger samples of diverse ancestries are available. Advances in genetic research have been skewed towards European ancestry populations, and the broader implication of our study is to eliminate this bias through the collection of large, diverse genotype samples and measuring their genotypes with arrays designed for multi-ancestry populations.

A growing literature points to children’s influence on parents’ behavior, including parental investments in children. Further, previous research has shown differential parental response by socioeconomic status to children’s birth weight, cognitive ability, and school outcomes—all early life predictors of later socioeconomic success. This study considers an even earlier, more exogenous predictor of parental investments: offspring genotype. Specifically, we analyze (1) whether children’s genetic propensity toward educational success affects parenting during early childhood and (2) whether parenting in response to children’s genetic propensity toward educational success is socially stratified. Using data from the Avon Longitudinal Survey of Parents and Children (N = 6,247), we construct polygenic indexes (PGIs) for educational attainment (EA) and regress cognitively stimulating parenting behavior during early childhood on these PGIs. We apply Mendelian imputation to construct the missing parental genotype. This approach allows us to control for both parents’ PGIs for EA and thereby achieve a natural experiment: Conditional on parental genotype, the offspring genotype is randomly assigned. In this way, we eliminate the possibility that child’s genotype may be proxying unmeasured parent characteristics. Results differ by parenting behavior: (1) parents’ singing to the child is not affected by the child’s EA PGI, (2) parents play more with children with higher EA PGIs, and (3) non-college-educated parents read more to children with higher education PGIs, while college-educated parents respond less to children’s EA PGI.

In this paper, we test two mechanisms through which cultural capital might affect educational performance: (a) teachers misinterpreting cultural capital as signals of academic brilliance and (b) cultural capital fostering skills in children that enhance educational performance. We analyse data from the ECLS‐K and ECLS‐K:2011 from the United States and focus on three aspects of children’s cultural capital: participation in performing arts, reading interest and participation in athletics and clubs. We find that (1) none of the three aspects of cultural capital that we consider affects teachers’ evaluations of children’s academic skills; (2) reading interest has a direct positive effect on educational performance; and (3) the direct effect of reading interest on educational performance does not depend on schooling context. Our results provide little support for the hypothesis that cultural capital operates via signals about academic brilliance. Instead, they suggest that cultural capital fosters skills in children that enhance educational performance. We discuss the theoretical implications of our findings.