The prevalence of inequality in learning outcomes have long been established in the field of sociology and educational research (see i.e. Teese et al., 2007) and the socioeconomic background (SES) of the students have repeatedly been found to account for a substantial portion of the variation in school performance. Secondary analysis of data from the international large scale assessment study PISA for example suggest that an average on 12% of the variation in performance can be explained by the SES of the student across the participating countries (see Figure II.2.5 in OECD, 2019). Consequently, much research within the field of education has been preoccupied with learning more about how this inequality arises and how to mitigate it.

A common trait from this research is that students from high-SES homes have a relative advantage compared to low-SES students. This advantage have many names in the literature: cultural capital (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1990), non-cognitive skills (Liu, 2020) and speech codes (Bernstein, 1971) to name just a few. Using differing terms and based on different theoretical points of origin, these theories all seem to suggest that high-SES students through their primary socialization in their familes are equipped with a set of competencies, which in an institutional setting like the school are utilized for educational success. While these theoretical explanations have been profoundly and meticulously discussed in sociological and educational research for at least fifty years (Gamoran & Long, 2007), empirical studies that test a complete model on how a) high-SES parents transmit or foster these crucial competencies at their offspring, b) how these competencies come at play inside the classroom and, c) how this specific employment of the competencies turns out as educational success, are still sparse. One specific reason is that data sets containing all the relevant information to test the full model empirically are very rare. However, by combining four longitudinal data sets on the same group of students in the Danish compulsory school and follow them throughout fourth, fifth and sixth grade, I will be able to test the full model empirically.

To this end the aim of the study is to present and test a theoretical and empirical model on why high-SES students have a higher chance of success in the educational system including the three crucial cruxes; a, b and c. To reach this aim, I will draw on sociological as well as pedagogical and didactical literature to build such a comprehensive theoretical model and test it empirically subsequently (see Model 1). In the model, I suggest that: a) high-SES students’ dialogical competencies are cultivated in their homes to a higher degree than is the case for low-SES students. This is obtained through for example kitchen table discussions. b) Inside the classroom, these dialogical competencies come in play in teacher-students interactions – namely, when teachers are giving feedback for learning – leading high-SES students to receive a more sophisticated type of feedback from the teachers. This feedback facilitates students to come up with their own learning strategies when faced with challenges, which in turns stimulate the students’ ability to be self-regulated learners. c) The ability to self-regulate ones learning is a crucial skill in the 21^st century schools in many countries and is recognized and rewarded in every day teaching as well as at assessments and exams leading high-SES student to perform better and thus have a higher chance of educational success. After presenting and testing the model, I discuss if and how this new model and knowledge can help mitigate the power of social background on educational success.

Model 1. SES->dialogical culture->facilitative feedback->self-regulated learning->learning progress

To learn more about the model and reach the research aim, I combine four sources of data. First, the concepts of dialogical culture, facilitative feedback and self-regulated learning is measured using two unique longitudinal student surveys; one is a nationwide well-being survey administered by the Danish Ministry of Education (Niclasen, Keilow, & Obel, 2018) and the other is a representative survey to evaluate a recent school reform administered by the Danish Center for Social Science Research (Nielsen, Jensen, Giver Kjer, & Arendt, 2020). Second, I enrich these data with national administrative test data to have sequentially measures of student performance (Beuchert & Nandrup, 2018). Finally, I connect this enriched data set with administrative data from Register Denmark (https://www.dst.dk/en) to have information on student background characteristics such as parental education and income, ethnicity, gender and age (see Figure 1 for an overview on data points). In total, I have data on 2.143 students including repeated measures of their school performance, their experienced feedback practices from inside the classrooms, their ability to self-regulate their learning and their dialogical culture at home alongside objective measures of their socioeconomic background. I will then use multilevel structured equation modeling (ML-SEM) (Hox, 2013) to build and test an empirical model that allows the inclusion of both latent and manifest variables and that takes into account the two-level structure of the data with students nested in classrooms. Figure 1. Overview of measures and timing Year 1 (fourth grade): Facilitative feedback, self-regulated learning and dialogical culture + test scores Year 2 (fifth grade): Facilitative feedback, self-regulated learning and dialogical culture Year 3 (sixth grade): Facilitative feedback, self-regulated learning and dialogical culture + test scores + socioeconomic background as an average of the three years

These are all preliminary results. I present the results list wise so that they correspond to the three parts of the proposed theoretical model (a, b and c in Model 1). First analyses indicate that: a) A relationship between parental education and dialogical culture at home. Parents with a college degree engage in more dialogues with their children (discuss politics, homework, books or television programs). b) The dialogical culture at home is related to the level of sophistication in the feedback practice the students experience in the classroom. This relationship is also apparent when including parental education in the SEM model. The more dialogues the students engage in with their parents, the more facilitative feedback they experience at school. Furthermore, the frequency in which they experience facilitative feedback relates positively to the development of self-regulated learning. c) Finally, the development of self-regulated learning is positively related to learning progress, measured as value added test performance. These results, when verified, indicate that schools are giving high-SES students preferential treatment, by offering more facilitative feedback to this group of students, which help them develop skills for self-regulated learning. The inequality in opportunities to learn has its roots in the students’ dialogical competencies, which are cultivated at home. To overcome this inequality in learning opportunities, teachers and schools must actively engage in facilitative feedback with all students to develop their self-regulated learning skills, irrespectively of their initial dialogical competencies when entering the school.

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