The effect of sibship size on school achievement in mathematics, reading, and science in the Czech Republic
Abstract
This paper investigates the effect of family size on educational achievement of 15-year-old students in the Czech Republic in 2003. We find out that a continuous measure of the number of co-residing siblings has a negative effect on school achievement and that its effect persists (somewhat reduced in size) even when controlling for family structure, parental education, type of school, and year at school.
We find no interactions between family size and other variables in the analysis. The main finding is consistent across various methods of dealing with missing data.
We conclude that given contemporary population trends, stratification scholars shall pay more attention to model specification and shall include family size among the predictors in status attainment models if they want to obtain unbiased parameter estimates.