The Organization of Children's Daily Lives as a Determinant of Academic Performance: How are Reading and Playing Videogames Related to Children's Success in Primary School?

In sociology of education, children's out-of-school practices are considered to be a key factor in explaining the persistent social inequality in school success. However, children's perspectives and how they spend their free time when no adults are involved is often overlooked in inequality research. In this study, Bourdieu's theory of cultural transmission is expanded from the perspective of Childhood Studies to conceptualize children as agents of sociocultural reproduction. The paper presents findings from the German EDUCARE study and focuses on two areas of children's daily lives: reading books and playing videogames, i.e. a school-related practice and a practice that is more or less unrelated to skills or content relevant to school success. The main research question is to what extent these practices mediate the correlation between parental cultural capital and school success. The analyses draw on questionnaire data of N = 1069 primary school children and their parents. The results show significant correlations between children's unsupervised practices and school success. However, there is only limited evidence of mediating effects of children's practices. The study highlights the necessity to include children's agency in research on educational inequality on a theoretical level as well as empirically.