Research into small-group collaboration during middle to late childhood shows that while individual understanding can be promoted through exchanging differing opinions, the joint analyses that groups construct while collaborating play a tangential role. Individuals may or may not accept these constructions depending upon processes of reflection and reconciliation that are triggered through difference and sometimes occur post-group. Recognizing a dearth of research with older participants (together with inconclusive suggestions that collaborative constructions may become more significant with age), the reported study examines the impact of small-group collaboration during adolescence and early adulthood. Forty-six pairs of students aged between 10 and 22 years worked on a computer-presented task that required them to discuss and predict the trajectories objects follow when they fall from stationary or moving carriers. Associations between group dialogue and post-test performance confirmed a key role for differing opinions while collaborative constructions turned out to have little relevance.
In the fields of education, sociology and economics, there is a long-standing connection between socioeconomic status (SES) and school outcomes in a wide variety of cultural settings, but these studies have yet to examine the possible mediating effects of domain-general cognitive factors such as executive functions (EF). Addressing this gap and building on evidence for links between EF and numeracy, the current cross-cultural study used a large sample (N = 835) of 9-to 16-year-old children from Hong Kong and the United Kingdom to the examine the independence and interplay of SES and EF as predictors of numeracy skills. Our analyses yielded three key findings: (1) EF consistently predicts numeracy skills across sites and genders;(2) Associations between SES and EF differ by site and gender; and (3) Associations between numeracy skills and SES/EF differ by site and gender. Together with previous findings, our results suggest culture-specific associations between SES, EF and numeracy, indicating that cultural insights may enable impactful shifts in public policy to narrow the achievement gap between children from affluent and disadvantaged families.
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