Family Environment and 11+ Success: Some Basic Predictors

S ummary . Our ability to analyse the socio‐cultural environment is vital to the development of research into the effects of social experience upon academic performance. This paper argues that, in the course of such development, there is an inevitable tendency to treat simple statistical predictors as indicators of causal mechanisms. An example of this problem is found in the way in which social class is often treated as a single experimental variable. In the present state of research sophistication it is better to treat social classes as social contexts within which particular factors may have special effects upon cognition and motivation. Analysis of sample data suggests that the effects of certain environmental variables are different in the different social classes.