Do Schools Promote Executive Functions? Differential Working Memory Growth Across the School Year and Summer Months

• In Event: 35.033 - Executive Functioning in Childhood

Abstract

Children’s working memory (WM) skills, which support academic and social success, continue to improve significantly through the school years. This study leverages the first nationally-representative dataset with direct assessments of elementary school students’ WM to examine whether WM grows more during the school-year or summer months, and whether WM growth rates differ by household income. Results demonstrate that WM grows more during the school-year months compared to the summer months, suggesting that school environments provide children with unique opportunities to improve their WM. Further, lower-income children have faster WM growth rates in the first two years of school and the intervening summer, compared to their higher-income peers, leading to a narrowing in income-based WM disparities during the early school years.

Author

• Jenna Elizabeth Finch, University of Nebraska - Lincoln