Is Parent-Child Communication More Beneficial to Lower or Higher SES Students? : A comparative study of reading literacy among 15-year olds in Korea and the United States.

Using the data from PISA 2000 (Program for International Student Assessment), this study compares the ways in which parent-child communication influences reading literacy among 15-year olds in Korea and the United States. Korea provides an interesting context for comparisons: higher mean achievement with substantially less variation in student performance and the high level of standardization of educational system. The results show that both aspects of parent-child communication ? social and cultural communication ? significantly affect children?s reading literacy, though the effect of social communication in the United States is negligible once family SES is controlled for. More interesting is that parent-child communication interacts with family SES in different ways in Korea and the United States. In the former, parental engagement in communication with children is more beneficial to lower SES students to result in the decreasing socioeconomic gap as the level of social communication increases. Contrastingly, parent-child communication is more effective for higher SES students in the United States, resulting in the rising difference in reading literacy between students from lower and higher SES families with the increasing level of parent-child communication. Detailed examinations of structural features of each educational system will help identify the contexts in which these differences are produced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]