Growing up in Rural vs. Urban Poverty: Contextual, Academic, and Cognitive Differences

Abstract

This chapter aims synthesize current literature and research from a variety of ields to highlight what we know about the (1) contextual, (2) academic, and (3) cognitive diferences between children growing up in urban versus rural poverty. The goal is to understand the unique needs of children growing up in urban and rural poverty to, in turn, place us in a beter position to efectively remediate through targeted interventions and policy change.

Temperament Predicts Processing Speed in Low Socioeconomic Status Rural Preschoolers

“…Interestingly, we neither find a relation between processing speed and the other individual nor socioenvironmental variables. This result disagree with previous studies that showed a relation between these factors and cognitive performance: parental education (Foulkes & Mori, ; Mykerezi et al, ; Tine, ), father's occupation and overcrowding (Ngure et al, ) as well as past preschool attendance (Castro & Rolleston, ; Gouin et al, ) have been associated with rural child cognitive achievement. In fact, our results suggested an effect of SES (linked with socioenvironmental variables) since these children obtained a mean processing speed performance lower than expected for their age.…”

“…Some studies used general cognitive development test (e.g. Gouin et al, ; Mykerezi et al, ; Ngure et al, ); others used specific skills tests—different from processing speed (Tine, ) and a final group of studies created a measure by combining other measures of cognitive achievement (Castro & Rolleston, ; Foulkes & Mori, ). Thus, our results could not find significant differences, unlike other studies which did find them, probably due to the cognitive measure used.…”

“…Over the last decades, public policies and interventions have been designed to attenuate the negative effect of poverty in cognitive development (Richter et al, ). However, most of them are targeted for urban populations (Schreuder, ; Tine, ). This bias may be a consequence of practical considerations (e.g., ease of access) but it fails to address the striking fact that worldwide, most of the inhabitants living in extreme poverty are children in rural populations (Olinto, Beegle, Sobrado, Uematsu, et al, ).…”

“…Previous research suggested that some features of scarceness which are prevalent in rural contexts present special risk factors for cognitive development. For example, rural settings have a largely reduced access to preschool education (Castro & Rolleston, ; Gouin et al, ) and fewer years of parental education (Foulkes & Mori, ; Mykerezi, Kostandini, Jordan, & Melo, ; Tine, ). Rural contexts have been also characterized by low‐quality dwellings and low parental occupation (Chambers, ), factors that has been shown to affect normal cognitive development (Ngure et al, ).…”

Location Matters: Distinct Cognitive and Academic Profiles of Students from Rural versus Urban Poverty

“…The current work documents a more complete cognitive profile of the two populations by determining that individuals from rural and urban poverty also have distinct inhibition abilities, but not language or incidental memory abilities. Taken together, these two general sets of findings improve our understanding of the cognitive development of individuals growing up in rural poverty-a growing, but underrepresented population (Lichter & Schafft, 2016;Murphy, 2007;Tine, 2017).…”