Data from the NICHD Study of Early Child Care (N = 1273) were analyzed to assess the longitudinal relations among executive function (EF) components in early childhood (54 months) and adolescence (15 years) and their prediction of academic achievement. We found that after controlling for early achievement, demographic and home environment variables, only working memory at 54 months significantly predicted working memory at 15 years and that working memory was the only significant EF predictor of achievement at age 15. In contrast, all early achievement measures were significant predictors of later achievement. Further, no demographic or home environment variables at 54 months significantly predicted EF at 15, and only maternal education significantly explained variance in adolescent math and literacy achievement. These findings demonstrate the predictability of working memory and highlight its importance for academic outcomes across development. However, the lack of associations of preschool inhibition and attention measures, after controlling for early achievement, demographic and home environment variables, to corresponding measures in adolescence suggests the need for more developmentally sensitive measures of EF. Given that the EF measures used in this study are commonly used in educational and psychological research, more care should go into understanding the psychometric properties across development.

Socioeconomic status (SES)—indexed via parent educational attainment, parent occupation, and family income—is a powerful predictor of children’s developmental outcomes. Variations in these resources predict large academic disparities among children from different socioeconomic backgrounds that persist over the years of schooling, perpetuating educational inequalities across generations. In this article, we provide an overview of a model that has guided our approach to studying these influences, focusing particularly on parent educational attainment. Parents’ educational attainment typically drives their occupations and income and is often used interchangeably with SES in research. We posit that parent educational attainment provides a foundation that supports children’s academic success indirectly through parents’ beliefs about and expectations for their children, as well as through the cognitive stimulation that parents provide in and outside of the home environment. We then expand this model to consider the intergenerational contributions and dynamic transactions within families that are important considerations for informing potential avenues for intervention.

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Data from the NICHD Study of Early Child Care (N = 1273) were analyzed to assess the longitudinal relations among executive function (EF) components in early childhood (54 months) and adolescence (15 years) and their prediction of academic achievement. We found that after controlling for early achievement, demographic and home environment variables, only working memory at 54 months significantly predicted working memory at 15 years and that working memory was the only significant EF predictor of achievement at age 15. In contrast, all early achievement measures were significant predictors of later achievement. Further, no demographic or home environment variables at 54 months significantly predicted EF at 15, and only maternal education significantly explained variance in adolescent math and literacy achievement. These findings demonstrate the predictability of working memory and highlight its importance for academic outcomes across development. However, the lack of associations of preschool inhibition and attention measures, after controlling for early achievement, demographic and home environment variables, to corresponding measures in adolescence suggests the need for more developmentally sensitive measures of EF. Given that the EF measures used in this study are commonly used in educational and psychological research, more care should go into understanding the psychometric properties across development.