The Influence of the Parents' Educational Level on the Development of Executive Functions

Abstract

Information about the influence of educational variables on the development of executive functions is limited. The aim of this study was to analyze the relation of the parents' educational level and the type of school the child attended (private or public school) to children's executive functioning test performance. Six hundred twenty-two participants, ages 5 to 14 years (276 boys, 346 girls) were selected from Colombia and Mexico and grouped according to three variables: age (5-6, 7-8, 9-10, 11-12, and 13-14 years), gender (boys and girls), and school type (private and public). Eight executive functioning tests taken from the Evaluacion Neuropsicologica Infantil; Matute, Rosselli, Ardila, & Ostrosky, (in press) were individually administered: Semantic Verbal Fluency, Phonemic Verbal Fluency, Semantic Graphic Fluency, Nonsemantic Graphic Fluency, Matrices, Similarities, Card Sorting, and the Mexican Pyramid. There was a significant effect of age on all the test scores and a significant effect of type of school attended on all but Semantic Verbal Fluency and Nonsemantic Graphic Fluency tests. Most children's test scores, particularly verbal test scores, significantly correlated with parents' educational level. Our results suggest that the differences in test scores between the public and private school children depended on some conditions existing outside the school, such as the parents' level of education. Implications of these findings for the understanding of the influence of environmental factors on the development of executive functions are presented.

Identifying a Threshold for the Executive Function Advantage in Bilingual Children

“…Socio-economic status is known to confer an executive function advantage (Ardila et al, 2005). The nature of that advantage is difficult to interpret, however, as SES is most likely a proxy for the opportunity to engage in challenging activities that lead to better executive function (Valian, 2015).…”

“…Socially advantaged 4-to 7-year-old children have been shown to perform faster than their age-matched peers in terms of accuracy and speed in a flanker task (Mezzacappa, 2004), and parental level of education has been shown to predict children's development of executive functions (Ardila, Rosselli, Matute, & Guajardo, 2005;Merz et al, 2015). A number of studies controlling for SES indeed found no bilingual advantage (e.g.…”

Associations Between Early Family Risk, Children’s Behavioral Regulation, and Academic Achievement in Portugal

“…Family income has been shown to negatively predict numerous academic outcomes (Burchinal et al, 2006;Krishnakumar & Black, 2002;McLoyd, 1998) and more recently, behavioral regulation (Evans & Rosenbaum, 2008;Mistry et al, 2010;Raver, Mccoy, Lowenstein, & Pess, 2013;Sektnan et al, 2010;Wanless, McClelland, Tominey, et al, 2011). It has also been established that children whose mothers have low levels of education are more likely to perform poorly on achievement and behavioral regulation tasks (Ardila, Rosselli, Matute, & Guajardo, 2005).…”

Executive function in Williams and Down syndromes

“…Although the latter finding -higher verbal IQ predicting a higher number of visuospatial inhibition errors -may indicate that the application of verbal strategies may be detrimental to performance on some tasks, the possibility that participants were using such strategies, such as verbal self-reminding (Russell, Jarrold, & Hood, 1999) (Noble, McCandliss, & Farah, 2007), level of parental education (Ardila, Rosselli, Matute, & Guajardo, 2005), disciplinary environment (Talwar, Carlson, & Lee, 2009) and the physical characteristics of the home environment (Faber Taylor, Kuo, & Sullivan, 2002). Such variables may also influence the cognitive performance of individuals with genetic syndromes.…”