Interrogating the Cultural Capital–Students’ Achievement Relationships

Abstract

This chapter reviews the published literature examining PISA data to derive three key insights on how cultural capital contributes to students’ academic achievement. The first insight provides support for the argument that cultural capital is a complex construct that can be measured using different indicators, that manifests in myriad ways in different societies, that have different influences on students’ learning, and that comprises both highbrow cultural consumption and parental familiarity with school evaluation standards and future job requirements. The second insight highlights the importance of understanding the relationships between cultural capital and students’ academic achievement in a nomological framework comprising cultural capital, habitus, and social fields. The third insight is that different cultural capital variables operate conjunctively, rather than separately, to influence students’ academic achievement. More specifically, they may be mutually reinforcing each other to engender synergy, exhibiting different patterns of association with students’ academic achievement depending on the profiles of students and their families, or compromising each other in their effects.