Assessing Children’s Executive Functions in Low-Income Contexts

• In Event: Roundtable Session (Tuesday I)
  In Refereed Round-Table Session: Community-based and multi-sectoral ECE programming

Proposal

Research on learners’ cognitive development around the world has yielded valuable insights into children’s executive functions. Such functions support individuals to better manage and regulate their behavior, and work towards the achievement of a prescribed task or goal (Diamond, 2013; Garon, Bryson, & Smith, 2008). Executive functions, which are commonly understood as comprising working memory, inhibition control and cognitive flexibility (Diamond, 2006), also correlate positively with children’s initial school readiness and academic achievement (Blair & Razza, 2007; Diamond & Lee, 2011), and show associations with long-term life outcomes including health, financial stability and the likelihood of criminal conviction (Moffitt et al., 2011).

However, studies on executive functions to date have typically focused on children living in higher-income contexts across Europe and North America. Much less research has investigated the cognitive development of learners in lower-income regions including sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America (Bellaj et al., 2016; Dias & Seabra, 2015). As such, relatively little has been known about the executive functions of many of the world’s most disadvantaged and marginalized children, whose education may be prevented or disrupted by extreme poverty, political instability or adverse environmental conditions.

The situation has nevertheless been changing over the past few years. There is now growing data on learners from different contexts and more diverse settings, not least Africa (Holding et al., 2018; McCoy, Zuilkowski, & Fink, 2015), Asia (Obradović et al., 2016; Tarullo et al., 2017) and Latin America (Hermida et al., 2015; Segretin et al., 2016). Further, multilateral organisations such as UNESCO and the World Bank are now assessing children’s executive functioning using the Measuring Early Learning Quality and Outcomes instruments.

Undertaking executive function research in these contexts and other lower-income environments presents a particular set of theoretical and methodological issues, which teams and individuals must address to ensure the rigor and validity of their data. This presentation therefore draws on the practical experience of empirical research conducted in Rwanda, Argentina and underprivileged communities in Canada to explore and discuss the challenges in greater detail.

Specifically, the presentation will consider the complexities of defining and translating constructs and concepts across different cultures, contexts and disciplines. The session will then discuss important factors in selecting appropriate tasks to measure executive functions in such environments, for example, literacy and numeracy constraints, the use of technology and the dimensionality of stimuli. Finally, the presentation will address some of the logistical challenges of conducting executive function research among low-income groups, not least language differences, finding quiet spaces for assessment, and securing the buy-in and consent of parents, teachers and the children themselves.

Authors

• Stephen Hamilton Bayley, University of Cambridge

• Mahsa Ershadi, Boston College

• Julia Hermida, National University of Hurlingham, Buenos Aires, Argentina