ArticleDevelopmental science2020
Individual differences in executive function partially explain the socioeconomic gradient in middle-school academic achievement.
Article in Developmental science, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 12 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
12 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Annual Research Review: Associations of socioeconomic status with cognitive function, language ability, and academic achievement in youth: a systematic review of mechanisms and protective factors.Journal of child psychology and psychiatry, and allied disciplines · 2025Pooled it
- Exploring a Range of Potential Factors Promoting and Constraining EF in South African Preschoolers.Developmental science · 2026Article
- Diverging Paths: Heterogeneity in Early Childhood Executive Function Development in Chile.Brain sciences · 2026Article
- Interpreting the Choice Logic Surrounding High-Scoring Students' Enrollment in China's Vocational Secondary-Undergraduate Articulation Program: A Theoretical Thematic Analysis of Public Discourse.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- A Longitudinal Study of Adolescent-to-Young Adult Executive Function Development in Seven Countries.Developmental science · 2025Article
- Do executive functions and processing speed mediate the relationship between socioeconomic status and educational achievement? Analysis of an observational birth cohort study.BMC psychology · 2024Observational
- Links between socioeconomic position and cognitive and behavioral regulation in adolescence: The role of pubertal development.Journal of research on adolescence : the official journal of the Society for Research on Adolescence · 2024Article
- The Relationship between Socioeconomic Status and Academic Achievement is Mediated and Moderated by Executive Functions.Journal of youth and adolescence · 2024Article
- Disrupting links between poverty, chronic stress, and educational inequality.NPJ science of learning · 2023Review
- Middle-childhood executive functioning mediates associations between early-childhood autism symptoms and adolescent mental health, academic and functional outcomes in autistic children.Journal of child psychology and psychiatry, and allied disciplines · 2022Article
- Children's Evolved Learning Abilities and Their Implications for Education.Educational psychology review · 2022Article
- A Machine Learning Approach to Personalize Computerized Cognitive Training Interventions.Frontiers in artificial intelligence · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
8 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Children from families with low socioeconomic status (SES) earn lower grades, perform worse on achievement tests, and attain less education on average than their peers from higher-SES families. We evaluated neurocognitive mediators of SES disparities in achievement in a diverse sample of youth whose data were linked to administrative records of performance on school-administered tests of 7th grade reading and math proficiency (N = 203). We used structural equation modeling to evaluate whether associations between SES (measured at ages 8-9) and achievement (measured at age 13) are mediated by verbal ability and executive function (measured at age 10), a suite of top-down mental processes that facilitate control of thinking and behavior. Children from relatively higher-SES families performed better than their lower-SES peers on all neurocognitive and achievement measures, and SES disparities in both reading and math achievement were partially mediated by variation in executive function, but not verbal ability. SES disparities in executive function explained approximately 37% of the SES gap in math achievement and 17% of the SES gap in reading achievement. Exploratory modeling suggests that SES-related variation in working memory may play a particularly prominent role in mediation. We discuss potential implications of these findings for research, intervention programming, and classroom practice.
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