The "optimism hypothesis" claims that immigrant students do better in the Norwegian education system than their socioeconomic status would suggest, due to the strong educational aspirations that immigrant parents might have for their children. Grounded in an educational equity paradigm, this study aims to test this hypothesis by…

High aspirations can be an important factor for educational attainment, especially for youth in disadvantaged schools who are otherwise more likely to leave school early. In this article, I study the relationships between pre-migration status, social capital, and educational aspirations among youth in disadvantaged Swedish schools, using data on…

We examined the accounts of Latino immigrant parent's perceptions of the contributions they made to their children's educational persistence. A community cultural wealth model was used and our results indicated that aspirational capital was the most common form of capital reported, while parents frequently demonstrated linguistic capital for…

Gypsy children low school engagement, high rates of school dropout, and pervasive school failure are relevant societal challenges that may be explained by Gypsy people cultural mores, but also by the discriminatory behaviors of school peers. The latter may be a consequence of insufficient accurate knowledge of Gypsy culture. The present study…

By giving early adolescents in their last 2 years of primary/elementary schooling opportunities to voice their ideas, teacher educators, school leaders, and teachers gain insight into how children view their mathematics learning. This article explores the views and aspirations of 34 11- to 13-year-old students from a range of socioeconomic schools…

Drawing on sociocultural and related theories, 4 questions examined career and educational aspirations and expectations among 24 immigrant Latina/o early adolescents and their parents as predictors of students' grades. First, adolescents' career aspirations and expectations were correlated, and both parents and adolescents held educational…

The literature in science education highlights the potentially significant role of outside-school factors such as parents, cultural contexts and role models in students' formation of science attitudes and aspirations, and their attainment in science classes. In this paper, building on and linking Bourdieu's key concepts of habitus, cultural and…

The authors used the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 1998-99 (ECLS-K) data to examine the mathematics and science achievement of two immigrant groups in the United States--Chinese and Mexican students. The authors also assessed variation in parental practices and fifth-grade achievement according to ethnicity and the age…