Jacob Hibel -- PSU Sociology

My dissertation examines the effects of performance-based differentiation practices in determining the quality and
equality of education production in United States elementary schools. From the earliest grade levels, children are
sorted and grouped based on their perceived academic and social abilities into instructional sub-groups ranging from
gifted/talented education to special education for learning or behavior problems. However, schools vary in their
organization of performance-based differentiation schemes; some schools use relatively few, more heterogeneous
student groupings while others construct many finely-graded instructional sub-units. I am investigating these
between-school differences in implemented performance-based differentiation practices to identify 1.) the forms of
institutional organization that lead to more equal academic outcomes from kindergarten through fifth grade, 2.) the
forms of organization that lead to the highest overall levels of achievement over the same time span, and 3.) the
differentiation schemes that produce the best balance between high-quality education production and equality of
educational opportunity.

Beginning with my masters thesis and continuing through several subsequent research projects, I have been
interested in the factors that lead children to be placed into special education with non-medical disabilities. While
most of us think of disability as a personal trait, my research has indicated that a child's likelihood of being placed
into special education is not solely determined by his or her own characteristics, but that it also depends in part on
the characteristics of the children with whom he or she is surrounded. For instance, in a paper co-authored by
George Farkas and Paul Morgan, we showed that an elementary school student in a school with higher average
achievement and better average student behavior is more likely to be placed in special education than an identical
student surrounded by lower-achieving, more poorly behaved students.
In other projects with Susan Faircloth and Michelle Frisco as well as Professors Farkas and Morgan, I have
examined patterns of special education placement among American Indian/Alaska Native students and academic
and social outcomes associated with early special education placement. Special education's role in educational
stratification continues to be a primary research interest of mine.

School readiness has been a central component of most of my research. The degree to which a child is prepared
to take on the role of 'student' at the time of kindergarten entry plays a significant role in determining the child's
early academic success, setting the stage for all subsequent learning. In a chapter co-authored with George
Farkas, we provided an overview of the social contextual factors that predicted high and low levels of academic and
behavioral school readiness. Indicators of cognitive and non-cognitive school readiness are important explanatory
factors in many of my other research projects as well.

As indicators of future academic succes, early language and literacy skills are of great interest to education
researchers. In a study conducted with Paul Morgan and George Farkas, we demonstrated that children who entered
school with background characteristics that placed them at risk for low language and literacy performance tended to
fall further behind their same-aged peers over time. However, children with advantageous backgrounds tended to enter
school with high levels of performance, but the gap between these students and their peers did not grow over time.
Put in terms of the "Matthew Effect", we found that the rich did not get richer, but the poor did in fact get poorer in
terms of early language development.

As large-scale immigration continues to transform the ethinc and cultural composition of the United States, these
social changes translate into new challenges and opportunities facing families, schools, and children. My research
on ethnicity, immigration, and education focuses on the relationships between different forms of immigrant
incorporation and the acadmic outcomes of immigrants and their children. Specifically, I have examined the
concomitant effects of national origin, ethnicity, and generational status on children's cognitive and behavioral
readiness to begin formal schooling; identifying particular immigrant groups who are most at risk of low school
readiness, those who are more resilient to the challenges facing recent immigrants, and subsequently describing
these groups' school readiness trajectories across generations and the influence of differential assimilation patterns.

Another research interest of mine is the interplay between biological and social influences on child development
and early life course inequality. While still a relatively nascent field of social science research, sociologists are
increasingly incorporating biological measures into their studies of causal social relationships, offering the promise
of further disentangling long-standing questions of "nature vs. nurture". In my own research, Alan Booth, Douglas
Granger, Cass Dorius, and I are studying the influences of maternal and paternal endocrine activity on mother-child
relationship quality, highlighting the influences of testosterone, estradiol, and cortisol on family relationships that
have typically only been examined from a behavioral perspective. Additionally, Dr. David Almeida and I recently
constructed a daily diary data collection instrument that was administered to 122 identical twins of elemntary
school age. In an initial analysis of these data co-authored by Kathryn Asbury, Dr. Almeida, Nicole Harlaar,
and Robert Plomin, we found that monozygotic twins experience the same classroom differently, and that
differences in classroom experiences are associated with differences in achievement. Data from this study
will allow us to further examine the relationships among genetic, shared environmental, and non-shared
environmental influences on children's daily academic performance and social behaviors in the near future.