Do Executive Functions Mediate the Link between Socioeconomic Status and Numeracy Skills? A Cross-Site Comparison of Hong Kong and the United Kingdom

Abstract

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.

Executive function measurement in urban schools: Exploring links between performance‐based metrics and teacher ratings

“…There is a dearth of executive function research with samples from high‐poverty, ethnic minority communities. The results of this two‐sample study are consistent with other studies using computerized performance‐based tasks in more affluent schools (e.g., Ellefson et al., 2020; Xu et al., 2020) and contributes two key findings. First, BASC2 EF in its original form is an adequate, but not excellent measure of everyday executive function behaviors by children from schools in high‐poverty communities; restricting analyses to only items included in BASC3 EF or using BASC3 EF is best practice.…”

Childhood disadvantage, neurocognitive development and neuropsychiatric disorders: Evidence of mechanisms

“…lower language skills and executive functioning) constitute pathways to disparities in later developmental deficits (e.g. low academic performance) [34,40 ▪ ,74–77,78 ▪ ,79]. These studies reinforce the importance of early interventions to interrupt the chain of developmental cascades that result from adversity, promote school readiness and reduce achievement gaps [80,81].…”

“…Several studies in our review investigated racial/ethnic, sex/gender and age/developmental stage differences in the associations between early childhood disadvantage and children's subsequent risk of neurodevelopmental deficits and neuropsychiatric disorders [75,100,103–105,106 ▪ ,107]. These studies highlight the importance of intersectionality theory in understanding disparities given that multiple social identities implicate the mechanisms described above, and often these mechanisms are reinforced in the context of multiple, marginalized identities and likely need to be addressed by interventions that aim to serve individuals exposed to disadvantage along multiple axes [108].…”

Online testing in developmental science: A guide to design and implementation

“…In the context of education, websites like Thinking Games (http://instructlab.educ.cam.ac.uk/TGsummary/) have implemented tasks testing for executive function skills for class-room use (see Ellefson et al, 2019) and used it, among others, to investigate the effects of executive function skills on the relation between numerical cognition and social-economic status (Ellefson et al, 2020). Another application domain is healthcare.…”