Smaller Families, Smarter Children? Relations between Student Achievement and Demography
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Abstract
The aim of the study is to examine the relationships between parental education, fertility, and student performance, with the goal of analyzing this system of relationships based on international data as well as domestic facts. The paper first presents a broad literature analysis on the relationship between family size and child academic achievement, then on the relationships between fertility and education, and on the relationship between parental education and PISA results. It then examines the correlation between these factors using macro analysis based on a broad international database. Finally, it analyzes the correlations using domestic data, concluding that domestic trends differ from global trends in several respects, which is due to successful and unsuccessful government policies.
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