Gender differences in non-cognitive abilities are important in explaining the "female advantage" in education. The existing literature, however, has not yet given a clear answer as to why gender differences in non-cognitive skills arise. Based on the theoretical perspective of social interaction, this research analyses how parenting…

Essentialism is the intuition that category membership relies on an invisible essence. Essentialist thinking about social categories is most evident in young children, while comparable methods do not reveal essentialist thinking about social groups in adult participants. However, previous work has found that essentialist thinking about gender was…

This paper examines changes in demographic and socioeconomic inequalities in student achievement over the school career, and the extent that these inequalities are accounted for by other influences such as, region and socioeconomic background (where appropriate), school differences and prior achievement. The data analysed are from a longitudinal…