Associations between household responsibilities and academic competencies in the context of education accessibility in Zambia

Abstract

The relationship between education and socioeconomic status has been demonstrated in studies of the developed and the developing world, yet there are communities in which schooling is either not available to all children or not a preferred activity for all children. In this study, we investigated the differences between children in-school and out-of-school in rural and peri-urban communities of Zambia. As expected, we found that the children in-school performed higher in domains of adaptive behavior and on assessments of academic achievement (i.e., mathematics, reading). Somewhat unexpectedly, however, when controlling for socioeconomic status, home responsibilities (i.e., chores, work) were a positive predictor for the performance of the children out-of-school, but a negative predictor for the children in-school. The relationship between home responsibilities and academic performance may be bidirectional and differential; for example, our findings allow for the hypothesis that for in-school children chores take time away from the studies, but for out-of-school children they provide some limited mathematics exposure.

The acquisition of problem solving competence: evidence from 41 countries that math and science education matters

“…The positive confounder effect of HDI is not surprising as HDI reflects a country's capability to distribute resources and to enable certain levels of autonomy (Reich et al 2013). To find national intelligence as a positive confounder is also to be expected as the basis for its estimation are often students' educational outcome measures (e.g., Rindermann 2008) and, as discussed earlier, academic achievement measures share the involvement of a set of cognitive processes (Baumert et al 2009;OECD 2004).…”

Obstructive and promotive factors for access to school and learning in primary school in Zambia

“…With regard to learning, factors are often explored at the student, school, and teacher levels. At the student level, obstructive factors are similar to those found for access, such as language (Altinok, 2013), household chores ( Jagero, 2010;Reich et al, 2013), being over age (Hungi et al, 2014), and the number of siblings (Liu et al, 2015). At the school level, school type (Zimmer and Toma, 2000), school management (Wößmann, 2003), the outcome assessment system (Bishop, 1995), class size (Hanushek and Wößmann, 2017), and length of the school day (Bellei, 2009;Orkin, 2013) are factors.…”

“…For learning, language is identified as an obstructive factor as students in Zambia generally speak the local language and are not proficient enough in the instructive language, English, to use it to learn any subjects (William, 1998). Another student-level factor is the need to engage in household chores, which is also found to be hindrance for students' ability to achieve academic excellence (Reich et al, 2013).…”

Separating the effects of ethnicity and socio-economic status on sleep practices of 6- to 7-month-old infants

“…Cultural and ethnic factors and their relationships with local socio-economic circumstances pose a unique set of challenges for studies of cognitive and brain development (see e.g. Jukes & Grigorenko, 2010;Reich et al, 2013;Zhan et al, 2011).…”