Interest in measurement of children's executive functions has shown a major increase over the past two decades. The present study evaluates two new apps (EYT and eFun) for measuring executive functions in children. The results of this study show that children (aged 5-8) enjoy executive function assessment in the form of games on an iPad. However, only one executive function, EYT working memory, showed significant positive correlations with several types of grades (e.g., English and maths) in primary school students. New, self-assessed, child-friendly executive function measurement tools have the potential to provide future possibilities for teachers to integrate information on cognitive ability into student learning plans.
Cognitive assessments can be expensive, lengthy and fatiguing for students and are often conducted in an artificial clinical context. In an effort to make the assessments more fun, researchers have started to introduce game elements to traditional cognitive tasks and training. This comes with a number of challenges. The main challenge is to develop an engaging tool that at the same time reliably assesses cognitive constructs in students. To address these challenges, this research aims to improve cognitive assessment with a new game-based assessment app that has been designed and developed in collaboration with researchers, teachers, students, and software engineers based on established cognitive theories, and subsequently validated through iterative testing in real world settings. The iterative development process is based on design-based research and includes cycles of design explorations, testing, analyses, redesign, and evaluation with students in authentic educational settings. The knowledge gained from the iterative process of designing a valid cognitive function app can inform other researchers who are aiming to develop cognitive assessment tools in an educational context.
This study examined prospective associations between poverty, gender, and school dropout in a large community sample of South African adolescents (Baseline: n = 3515, Follow-up: n = 3401, 57% female, age range at baseline: 10-17 years, mean age at baseline = 13.45). School dropout was defined as being enrolled in school at baseline assessment but no longer enrolled in school at follow-up assessment. Poverty was measured at baseline assessment using an index of access to the eight highest socially-perceived necessities for South African children and adolescents. Demographic characteristics including child gender and age, province, and urban versus rural location were recorded at baseline assessment and controlled for in the analysis. As predicted, higher poverty scores (AOR = 2.01, p < .001) were associated with increased odds of school dropout one year later. Gender was not a significant predictor of school dropout (AOR = 1.56, p = .07) but did interact with poverty (AOR = 0.66, p = .04) in predicting school dropout. However, our initial hypothesis that the impact of poverty on school dropout would be stronger for girls than boys was not supported. Instead, results indicated that while girls were at elevated risk of school dropout at low and mean levels of poverty, at high levels of poverty this gender difference was no longer evident. Findings suggest that vulnerable boys should not be neglected in policies to improve retention in education in contexts of extreme poverty.
Validating new executive function tasks for children is challenging because valid comparison measures are lacking. The traditional validated executive function tasks were designed for adults and are therefore not suited for assessment with children. Therefore, in this study we compared the new child friendly executive functions measurement tool (eFun) against the traditional executive function tasks in a sample of adult participants.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.