Digital Practices for Reading Study

Researchers "used an academic resilience framework to explore how adolescents from low socioeconomic status (SES) backgrounds overcame adversity and achieved high levels of reading proficiency. Our main aim was to investigate whether digital reading practices and reading engagement (reading motivation and metacognitive strategies) could act as protective factors, individually and collectively, promoting academic resilience among students with low SES. Digital reading was related to reading motivation, and then to better awareness of metacognitive strategies, which in turn was shown to be linked to increased reading achievement for all students.

Jang, E., Seo, Y., & Brutt-Griffler, J. (2022). Building Academic Resilience in Literacy: Digital Reading Practices and Motivational and Cognitive Engagement. Reading Research Quarterly. 

https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.486 

Economic and Educational Inequalities and the School-Readiness Gap

A study conducted by researchers at the Economic Policy Institute examined the relationship between children’s socioeconomic status (SES) and their cognitive and noncognitive skills when starting school. We find that large performance gaps exist between children in the lowest and highest socioeconomic-status (SES) quintiles. Results show children’s social class is one of the most significant predictors—if not the single most significant predictor—of their educational success. Moreover, it is increasingly apparent that performance gaps by social class take root in the earliest years of children’s lives and fail to narrow in the years that follow. That is, children who start behind stay behind—they are rarely able to make up the lost ground. Low educational achievement leads to lowered economic prospects later in life, perpetuating a lack of social mobility across generations. This study shows how the undeniable relationship between economic inequalities and education inequalities represents a societal failure that betrays the ideal of the “American dream.”

Garcia, E., & Weiss, E. (2017). Education inequalities at the school starting gate: Gaps, trends, and strategies to address them. Washington, D.C.: Economic Policy Institute. http://www.epi.org/files/pdf/132500.pdf