The purpose of this study is to compare black children with white children to determine if a significant difference exists between their scores on the subtests of the ITPA.

The Relationship between Parental Educational Level and Children’s Cognitive Functioning This study investigated the relationship between a child’s measured intelligence and the educational level of that child’s mother and/or father. Correlations between parental educational level and children’s cognitive functioning as measured by a conventional South African intelligence scale, were examined. The instrument used to measure the children’s cognitive functioning in this study was the Senior South African Individual Scale-Revised (SSAIS-R). The children’s scaled scores were obtained from existing results on the SSAISR. Parental educational levels were obtained from existing intake questionnaires, which parents completed before their children were assessed on the SSAIS-R at the Centre for Psychological Services and Career Development (PsyCaD). Correlational analysis was used to investigate the relationship between the two variables of interest. The sample consisted of 23 cases. All of the children were aged between 8 and 10, spoke either English or Afrikaans as a first language, and belonged to the White, Indian or Coloured population groups. The results indicated that maternal level of education was positively and moderately correlated with children’s cognitive functioning. Paternal educational level and children’s cognitive functioning were found to have no correlation or to be inversely correlated. The correlation results between paternal level of education and children’s cognitive functioning should be interpreted with caution since the sample size was very small. Thus, the results are not statistically significant.

In the aftermath of the global pandemic, it is important to investigate its effects. Previous research suggests that the pandemic has negatively affected students’ school performance and that students with low-educated parents are more disadvantaged than their highly educated counterparts. In this field of research, previous Swedish studies on the pandemic effect are rare. To evaluate the effect of different strategies during the pandemic a comparative design is applied in the present study, where two countries with different strategies are compared. This thesis aims to investigate the effects of the pandemic strategies on educational performance, more specifically math scores, in Germany and Sweden, and whether the effect differed between levels of cultural capital. To reach the aim, a difference-in-differences approach is conducted, using interaction terms between year and country. The data are from the OECD’s PISA tests from 2018 and 2022, where 15-year-olds’ knowledge is assessed. The results show that both countries’ test scores were negatively affected during the pandemic, but no general difference between the countries was found. When analyzing the score changes over time within groups of parental educational level the change was larger for the students with medium relative to highly educated parents in both Sweden and Germany. There was no change for the loweducated group in Sweden, and it was small in Germany. There was no significant difference in test scores between the years and countries depending on the level of parental education. In conclusion, the pandemic effect on educational performance did not statistically differ between the countries. The scores of the children with medium-educated parents had the largest drop, and the children with low-educated parents had the smallest drop in score, if any.