Students' interactional cultural capital and academic performance in test- and teacher-based assessments

Qualitative work highlights the significance of students' interactional cultural capital in educational settings—that is, cultural resources that help to navigate/interact with educational institutions and gatekeepers. We make a first attempt to measure expressions of students' interactional cultural capital quantitatively, and examine their relationship with academic performance. Using data on over 1200 Dutch students in their final year of primary school, we find positive associations between several expressions of students' interactional cultural capital (knowledge about the educational system; perceived cultural match between home and school) and academic performance. These positive relationships are equally strong for teacher- and test-based assessments of performance, suggesting that these forms of cultural capital help students in their learning rather than providing educational benefits via teacher biases. We find little support for positive relations between students' help-seeking strategies and academic performance. Different help-seeking behaviors do not form a unified cultural “strategy” and are not stratified by socio-economic status (SES) as anticipated. For educational knowledge, we find some support for the cultural mobility hypothesis: SES-based performance gaps, particularly in teacher assessments, are smaller among students with greater knowledge of the educational system.