Peers Matter: Links Between Classmates’ and Individual Students’ Executive Functions in Elementary School

Abstract

Students' executive functions (EFs) are linked to school success. Although school-age children spend much of their time interacting with peers, few studies have explored how children's classmates may promote EF development in elementary school. In this study, we test whether mean levels and variability in classmates' EF skills are associated with growth in individual students' accuracy and speed on EF tasks among third, fourth, and fifth graders (N = 806). We find that classmates' speed, but not accuracy, on EF tasks is linked to significant improvements in individual students' EFs over the school year. Classmates' average EFs, as indexed by faster accurate responses on EF tasks, are associated with improvements in individual students' speed on EF tasks. These results were robust to the inclusion of individual students' general processing speed. In contrast, variability in classmates' accuracy and speed on EF tasks was not associated with individual students' EF growth. Our results highlight the role of peers and the school context for EF development in middle childhood.

Cognition in context: Validating group-based executive function assessments in young children

“…Research into classroom peer effects on young children's EF performance has been steadily accumulating over the past decade. Findings from this work suggest that having classmates with poor self-regulation and EF skills can negatively influence the acquisition and development of individual EF skill development during elementary school (Finch et al, 2019;Montroy, Bowles, & Skibbe, 2016;Weiland, Ulvestad, Sachs, & Yoshikawa, 2013). Much of this research has leveraged multi-level modeling techniques to estimate peer effects by generating classroom averages of students' performance on standardized EF tasksconsistently finding links between average peer EF skills and individual students' EF performance across early schooling (Finch et al, 2019;Montroy, Bowles, & Skibbe, 2016;Weiland, Ulvestad, Sachs, & Yoshikawa, 2013).…”

Exploring Idiographic Approaches to Children's Executive Function Performance: An Intensive Longitudinal Study

“…This study was the first to use an idiographic approach in the study of EFs among youth in late childhood/early adolescence. Previous studies of EF development among school-aged children have mainly utilized a variable-centered approach, either comparing school-aged children of different age groups or collecting data at multiple widely spaced timepoints among the same group of children (e.g., Huizinga et al, 2006 ; Finch et al, 2019 ). These studies provided evidence that EF is still improving during middle to late childhood or even later.…”

“…The attention variable was indexed by “off-task” trials created based on reaction time. Trials with reaction times shorter than 200 msec were defined as anticipatory responses and “off-task” trials (Finch et al, 2019 ; Miyake et al, 2000 ; Sulik & Obradović, 2018 ). Trials with reaction times more than three standard deviations above the child's daily mean or longer than 3000 msec indicated a loss of attention and were also identified as “off-task” trials (Zelazo et al, 2013 ).…”

Genetics and Child Development: Recent Advances and Their Implications for Developmental Research

“…Moreover, polygenic scores could shed light on reciprocal influences among children in shared environments. For instance, nongenetic research has shown that elementary school children’s improvements in cognitive skills across the school year were associated with their classmates’ cognitive skills across the school year, suggesting that peers’ cognitive development may influence children’s own cognitive development (Finch, Garcia, Sulik, & Obradović, 2019). Polygenic scores could be integrated into this type of research to consider selection effects and to test whether genetic similarity among children modulates reciprocal influences.…”