| A major goal of the American educational system is providing high quality educational experiences for all groups that make up the national population. However, individuals from traditionally disadvantaged groups, such as race/ethnic minorities, lag behind their more advantaged peers in levels of academic achievement and educational attainment. Most researchers agree that these gaps persist, in part, because students from different population groups come from quite different social—family, school, and community—contexts, and social context is strongly related to academic outcomes.; This dissertation focuses on African American-White differences in performance on tests of cognitive ability and in college attendance in the first years following high school graduation. Using linear and logistic regression models generated from theories in economics and sociology, this study investigates which social context factors most affect outcomes, whether differential effects for African Americans and Whites can be discerned, and if these social context effects have changed over time. Data for this study come from surveys of three cohorts of nationally representative samples of students who were public high school seniors in 1972 (the National Longitudinal Survey of the High School Class of 1972, NLS), 1982 (High School and Beyond, HSB), and 1992 (the National Education Longitudinal Study, NELS) and who responded to their first post-high school follow-up survey.; Results indicate that the African American-White gaps in cognitive test scores and in the likelihood of attending college, in general, have decreased over time. Although adjusting for social context factors, particularly school opportunity to learn variables, reduces these gaps, the theoretical models generally provide a better fit to the data for Whites than for African Americans. Family socioeconomic status consistently exhibits a positive relationship with both outcomes of interest with similar effect sizes for African Americans and for Whites. College expectations is also an important predictor, although the strength of the associations increased over time for Whites and decreased for African Americans. |
