Executive functions in elementary school : contextual influences and links to adaptive functioning
Keywords: Education.

Executive functions are a set of higher-order cognitive skills under the broader umbrella of self-regulation skills, which represent children's abilities to regulate their attention and behaviors. While prior research shows that executive functions skills continue to improve through adolescence, most work has focused on the early childhood period. When children enter elementary school, they are faced with increased expectations for their self-regulatory abilities as they encounter more complex academic material, engage in multifaceted learning activities with peers, and have more responsibility for managing their schoolwork and behaviors. This dissertation examines how children's executive functions are linked to their classroom behaviors and the role of schools for the development of children's executive functions during the elementary school years. The first paper examines the unique contributions and interplay of children's executive function skills and challenge preference for adaptive classroom behaviors. Findings show that both executive functions and challenge preference independently predict students' task orientation, assertiveness, peer social skills, and frustration tolerance, whereas only executive functions are linked to students' conduct problems. Implications include structuring classrooms to promote challenge preference by focusing on effort and learning. The second paper uses a nationally-representative sample of kindergarteners in the United States to examine working memory development in early elementary school. Results demonstrate that students' working memory skills grow more during the school-year months compared to the summer months, suggesting that school environments provide children with unique opportunities to improve and practice their working memory skills. Moreover, lower-income children demonstrate significantly faster working memory growth rates during the kindergarten school year, the summer after kindergarten, and the first-grade school year, leading to an overall closing of working memory gaps between children from lower- and higher-income families. There was no evidence, however, that schools equalize or exacerbate income-based inequality in children's working memory skills. The third paper focuses on the classroom context, and specifically how children's classmates influence their executive function development in upper-elementary school. Findings demonstrate that classmates' speed on executive function tasks is linked to significant improvements in individual students' executive functions over the school year. Classmates' average executive functions, as indexed by faster accurate responses on executive function tasks, are associated with improvements in individual students' speed on executive function tasks. Further, students in classrooms with more variability in speed demonstrate increased executive function growth from fall to spring. In contrast, classmates' accuracy on executive function tasks is not associated with individual students' executive function growth. Together, these papers highlight the role of executive functions for school success and point to the classroom as a key context to support EF development. Through this dissertation, I hope to provide a deeper understanding of executive function development during the elementary school years, to identify ways in which school environments can be structured to promote children's executive function skills.