Abstract

For many decades the relation between parents’ education and educational success has usually been established. In general, people from families with a higher educational background has been found to perform better than those from families with lower educational levels. This phenomenon ultimately leads to a social-reproduction of inequalities between social classes with more and less education. The cognitive origins of such inequality are rarely qualitatively explored. The present study is an attempt to study this link. It looks to 8 to 9 year old children thinking behavior for learning (self-regulated learning) by analyzing their actions in a recorded experimental task. The study also gathers information about the children’s families and the way they interact and act in it for learning purposes, such as parental helping styles, or level to which the student is expected to solve problems independently. The importance of these type of family related aspects, or “thinking cultural capital”, is explored across students from both Chile and England, as well as higher and lower social classes. Surprisingly, preliminary analysis suggests the level of successful performance in the experimental tasks relate more to the orientations children have towards challenges and difficulties rather than family characteristics as such. Students from both lower and higher SES benefit when they show a positive orientation to challenge, and they demonstrate poor performance when they hold negative orientation to challenge. The role for this phenomenon of specific aspects of self-regulated learning, such as “awareness of difficulty” or “learning from errors”, will be considered and discussed at the presentation.