How teachers form educational expectations for students: A comparative factorial survey experiment in three institutional contexts.

While schools are thought to use meritocratic criteria when evaluating students, research indicates that teachers hold lower expectations for students from disadvantaged backgrounds. However, it is unclear what the unique impact is of specific student traits on teacher expectations, as different traits are often correlated to one another in real life. Moreover, research has neglected the role of the institutional context, yet tracking procedures, financial barriers to education, and institutionalized cultural beliefs may influence how teachers form expectations. We conducted a factorial survey experiment in three contexts that vary with respect to these institutional characteristics (The United States, New York City; Norway, Oslo; the Netherlands, Amsterdam). We asked elementary school teachers to express expectations for hypothetical students whose characteristics were experimentally manipulated. Teachers in the different contexts used the same student traits when forming expectations, yet varied in the importance they attached to these traits. In Amsterdam - where teachers track students on the basis of their performance and tracking bears significant consequences for educational careers - we found a large impact of student performance. In Oslo - where institutions show an explicit commitment to equality of educational opportunity - teachers based their expectations less on student effort, and seemed to make more inferences about student performance by a student's socio-economic background. New York teachers seemed to make few inferences about student performance based on their socio-economic background.

Sibling Similarity in Education Across and Within Societies.

The extent to which siblings resemble each other measures the omnibus impact of family background on life chances. We study sibling similarity in cognitive skills, school grades, and educational attainment in Finland, Germany, Norway, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States. We also compare sibling similarity by parental education and occupation within these societies. The comparison of sibling correlations across and within societies allows us to characterize the omnibus impact of family background on education across social landscapes. Across countries, we find larger population-level differences in sibling similarity in educational attainment than in cognitive skills and school grades. In general, sibling similarity in education varies less across countries than sibling similarity in earnings. Compared with Scandinavian countries, the United States shows more sibling similarity in cognitive skills and educational attainment but less sibling similarity in school grades. We find that socioeconomic differences in sibling similarity vary across parental resources, countries, and measures of educational success. Sweden and the United States show greater sibling similarity in educational attainment in families with a highly educated father, and Finland and Norway show greater sibling similarity in educational attainment in families with a low-educated father. We discuss the implications of our results for theories about the impact of institutions and income inequality on educational inequality and the mechanisms that underlie such inequality.

Cascading Crises: Society in the Age of COVID-19.

The tsunami of change triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic has transformed society in a series of cascading crises. Unlike disasters that are more temporarily and spatially bounded, the pandemic has continued to expand across time and space for over a year, leaving an unusually broad range of second-order and third-order harms in its wake. Globally, the unusual conditions of the pandemic-unlike other crises-have impacted almost every facet of our lives. The pandemic has deepened existing inequalities and created new vulnerabilities related to social isolation, incarceration, involuntary exclusion from the labor market, diminished economic opportunity, life-and-death risk in the workplace, and a host of emergent digital, emotional, and economic divides. In tandem, many less advantaged individuals and groups have suffered disproportionate hardship related to the pandemic in the form of fear and anxiety, exposure to misinformation, and the effects of the politicization of the crisis. Many of these phenomena will have a long tail that we are only beginning to understand. Nonetheless, the research also offers evidence of resilience on several fronts including nimble organizational response, emergent communication practices, spontaneous solidarity, and the power of hope. While we do not know what the post COVID-19 world will look like, the scholarship here tells us that the virus has not exhausted society's adaptive potential.

The COVID Connection: Pandemic Anxiety, COVID-19 Comprehension, and Digital Confidence.

This article presents logistic models examining how pandemic anxiety and COVID-19 comprehension vary with digital confidence among adults in the United States during the first wave of the pandemic. As we demonstrate statistically with a nationally representative data set, the digitally confident have lower probability of experiencing physical manifestations of pandemic anxiety and higher probability of adequately comprehending critical information on COVID-19. The effects of digital confidence on both pandemic anxiety and COVID-19 comprehension persist, even after a broad range of potentially confounding factors are taken into account, including sociodemographic factors such as age, gender, race/ethnicity, metropolitan status, and partner status. They also remain discernable after the introduction of general anxiety, as well as income and education. These results offer evidence that the digitally disadvantaged experience greater vulnerability to the secondary effects of the pandemic in the form of increased somatized stress and decreased COVID-19 comprehension. Going forward, future research and policy must make an effort to address digital confidence and digital inequality writ large as crucial factors mediating individuals' responses to the pandemic and future crises.

How do parents' educational fields affect the choice of educational field?

This study examines the links between parental education and students' choice of field of study in Norwegian higher education. In our interpretation of the results, we suggest a status group perspective that integrates risk aversion models, micro-class theory, and cultural reproduction schemes. Complete Norwegian register data for all individuals born from 1955 to 1980 allow for a fine-grained examination of diverse fields of study not attempted in earlier studies. The findings reveal that intergenerational reproduction of educational fields is widespread, but its extent varies across fields of study. The tendency is most pronounced among children of professional, educated parents with masters and higher-level degrees. Moreover, the analysis shows that students who do not choose the same field as their parents nonetheless tend to choose educational fields close to those of their parents.