Understanding the Nature and Role of Executive Functions in Children's Academic Development

Abstract

Based on evidence that socioeconomic-related achievement gaps emerge prior to school entry, many researchers have focused on identifying the foundational cognitive skills that support children’s school readiness and early academic development. In recent years, executive functions have emerged as potential targets for intervention, given their well-documented links with both socioeconomic status (SES) and children’s achievement across the school transition period. Yet, just how executive functions may relate to children’s academic development remains a topic of debate. Some conceptualize associations between executive functions and achievement as operating through a global construct, whereas others believe individual executive function components to be uniquely and differentially supportive of children’s achievement. The first study of this dissertation evaluated these competing hypotheses, demonstrating that associations between children’s executive functions and achievement operate exclusively through individual executive function components, and working memory in particular. These findings highlight the specific importance of working memory for children’s early academic development and challenge the use of a single latent factor for characterizing associations between young children’s executive functions and their academic achievement. Based on the assumption that associations between executive functions and achievement operate through a global construct, recent work has demonstrated that unitary executive function constructs mediate SES-achievement relations. However, less attention has been paid to unpacking the role of specific executive function components in linking SES to achievement. Therefore, for the second study of this dissertation, path analysis was used to show that after controlling for baseline academic skills, verbal ability, and other child- and family-level covariates, only working memory mediated the association between parent education and children’s math achievement. These findings offer a comprehensive examination of the specific cognitive mechanisms through which socioeconomic disadvantage contributes to children’s academic development and provide an initial step towards generating more precise targets for policies and interventions aimed at closing the achievement gap. Yet, although study two provides a more nuanced understanding of the cognitive mechanisms underlying associations between SES indicators and children’s achievement, it does not account for the proximal processes, like parenting and the home environment, that also play a role in shaping children’s executive functions and achievement. Therefore, the final study of this dissertation tested a sequential mediation model by which SES predicted maternal sensitivity and the provision of a cognitively stimulating home environment, which in turn predicted children’s executive functions, which finally predicted their first-grade math and reading achievement. Findings revealed that after controlling for a host of potentially confounding influences, parent education, but not family income-to-needs, was related to children’s math and reading achievement indirectly via sequential paths that included both parenting factors—maternal sensitivity and cognitive stimulation—and children’s working memory skills. Parent education was also related to children’s reading achievement through its effect on cognitive stimulation alone. Taken together, these findings underscore the particular importance of parent education and working memory for children’s early academic development and demonstrate that contextual and cognitive factors combine in unique ways to shape socioeconomic-related differences in children’s early academic skills.