Effects of socioeconomic status and executive function on school readiness across levels of household chaos

Abstract

Isolating child attributes and familial characteristics that support school readiness in children on the upper half of the socioeconomic spectrum can complement existing research on lowersocioeconomic status (SES) children and facilitate a more complete understanding of how children's performance varies across the full SES spectrum. This study examined if relations between SES, two components of executive function (EF; set-shifting and inhibitory control), and school readiness vary as a function of household chaos in 564 four-year-old children, primarily from middle-to upper-middle class families in the Northeast Region of the United States. Structural equation modeling of direct and indirect effects revealed three major findings: 1) higher levels of EF were related to better school readiness regardless of level of household chaos; 2) SES had an indirect effect on school readiness through set-shifting; and 3) household chaos was negatively associated with school readiness.

Promotion of Street-Dance Training on the Executive Function in Preschool Children

“…EF provide the necessary foundation for the development of children's learning ability and sociality. It helps children to learn and process new information, which is related to the development of children's multiple abilities and closely related to language, mathematics, and social abilities in the field of school readiness (Zelazo et al, 2017;Micalizzi et al, 2019). Good EF helps children to meet the requirements of the family (such as obeying rules) and classroom (such as sitting in silence) (Carlson et al, 2013;Muller and Kerns, 2015).…”

Pathways from Socioeconomic Status to Early Academic Achievement: The Role of Specific Executive Functions

“…Due to its association with both SES and academic achievement, EF has been proposed as a candidate for mediating SES-achievement relations. Accordingly, a number of studies have explored the role of EF in explaining SES-related gaps in school readiness (Dilworth-Bart, 2012; Fitzpatrick, McKinnon, Blair, & Willoughby, 2014;Micalizzi, Brick, Flom, Ganiban, & Saudino, 2019), as well as achievement in first grade (Nesbitt, Baker-Ward, & Willoughby, 2013;Sektnan et al, 2010), fifth grade (Crook & Evans, 2014), and in a sample of children ages 6 through 15 (Lawson & Farah, 2017). Results from these investigations provide initial evidence that EF mediates SES-achievement relations across various developmental periods, particularly for math skills (Crook & Evans, 2014;Dilworth-Bart, 2012;Lawson & Farah, 2017;Sektnan et al, 2010).…”

Does Language Make a Difference? A Study of Language Dominance and Inhibitory Control

“…Second, although we controlled for maternal education (proxy for socio-economic status; SES) in our analyses, the fact that the majority of the bilingual children had mothers with low levels of education (high school or less) needs to be addressed more closely. Previous research has shown that SES may affect executive function (see Lawson et al, 2018 for a meta-analysis), in which higher SES is related to better executive function and that low SES can negatively affect school readiness (e.g., Micalizzi et al, 2019 ) and language outcomes (e.g., Hart and Risley, 1992 ; Noble et al, 2005 ; Maguire et al, 2018 ). When bilingual children are matched by SES with monolingual children, studies on executive function have shown conflicting results varying from a bilingual advantage (e.g., Calvo and Bialystok, 2014 ; Krizman et al, 2016 ), a bilingual advantage only for children from low SES backgrounds (e.g., Naeem et al, 2018 ), or no bilingual advantage (e.g., Morton and Harper, 2007 ).…”