This section explores how a parent’s level of education may relate to their child’s academic outcomes, using visualizations to highlight patterns rather than definitive conclusions. The box plot and violin plot compare test score distributions across groups defined by parental educational attainment—ranging from some high school through high school diplomas, associate’s degrees, bachelor’s degrees, some college, and master’s degrees. Together, these plots illustrate both the spread and concentration of scores within each category, allowing for closer comparison of central tendencies, variability, and overlap between groups. Rather than pointing to a single causal explanation, these visualizations invite consideration of how family educational background might intersect with academic performance while leaving room for other contributing factors.
This box plot is full of rich information, it allows us to see a marked differnce in averages, peaks, and lows.
Our graph reveals a clearly higher average test score for children whose parents went to higher levels of education, in the order of master's degree, bachelor's degree, and associate's degree. While, unsurprisingly, high school and some high school are scoring the lowest. But is that the end of the picture?
This colorful violin plot brings much color to the information.
If we were only to look at our box plot, the information might look grim for children with parents who didn't attend higher education. But, when we take our violin plot into consideration we can see that the variability is striking!
Far from being hopeless, children from all different parental levels of education backgrounds can and do perform well on these tests.
The higher level of education that a child's parent was able to participate in seems to show a marked improvement in average test scores. But do not let this data cause distress, for our violin plot shows that all children are capable of scoring very well.