Abstract
This chapter contextualizes the evolving scholarship on the relationships between cultural capital and students’ academic achievement. It cogently argues that while the extant field has benefited from the proliferation of research interrogating the relationships between cultural capital and students’ academic achievement, the knowledge base on cultural capital theory is still conspicuously wanting in terms of substantive clarification of the meaning and workings of the cultural capital construct. Therefore, this book is written to fill this knowledge gap. The present chapter delineates the aims of the book before inviting readers to reframe their research questions in order to advance the extant scholarship. These aims are namely, to elucidate the complexity of cultural capital as an explanatory heuristic in the examination of the relationship between students’ familial social origins and their academic achievement, to take stock of the emerging trajectory of sociologists employing quantitative methods to examine issues of educational inequality, and to contribute to the scholarship on cultural capital theory.
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Tan, C.Y. (2020). Introduction. In: Family Cultural Capital and Student Achievement. SpringerBriefs in Education. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-4491-0_1
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