Peers Matter: Links between Classmates’ and Individual Students’ Executive Functions in Elementary School

• In Event: 1-144 - Executive Functions in Flux: Contextualising our Approaches for the Real World

Integrative Statement

Executive functions (EFs) are important predictors of children’s academic and social success (Ciairano et al., 2007; Jacob & Parkinson, 2015). While EFs improve significantly in middle childhood (Diamond, 2013), very few studies have explored how the classroom context influences students’ EFs after school entry. In upper-elementary school, children engage in more frequent peer-to-peer interactions which are less likely to be mediated by adults (Gifford-Smith & Brownell, 2003). Peer interactions also become increasingly complex in middle childhood, requiring students to self-regulate their behaviors to engage in organized play and discussions. In early childhood, there is some evidence that mean levels of classmates’ EFs are linked to individual preschoolers’ EF growth during the academic year (Montroy et al., 2016; Skibbe et al., 2012). We are the first to examine how classmates’ EFs are associated with the development of individual students’ EFs in middle childhood in a diverse sample.

This study leverages repeated direct assessments of third-, fourth-, and fifth-graders’ EFs for nearly all children across 33 classrooms (N = 806). EFs were directly assessed with four standardized tablet computer tasks (Hearts and Flowers, Flanker, Digit Span Backwards, Multi-Source Interference Task) and combined to create accuracy and reaction time (RT) composite measures. EF group assessments were conducted simultaneously with all students in the classroom at the beginning and end of the school year. Group-based assessments of EFs are more strongly correlated with students’ achievement than individual lab-type assessments (Obradović et al., 2017), and thus may be a more ecologically-valid measure of EFs in the classroom. Classmates’ mean and standard deviation of EFs were created from students’ individual EF composites. Child gender, average grade level, and school proportion of low-income students were included as covariates.

Multilevel modeling was used to account for the clustering of students within classrooms. We found that classmates’ EFs, as indexed by faster accurate responses on EF tasks, were associated with students’ growth in EFs. First, students who were in classrooms that had faster RTs, on average, showed higher growth in RTs over the school year (β = 0.336, p = .005). Second, students who were in classrooms with more heterogeneity in RTs showed more growth in RTs (β = 0.617, p = .017). In contrast, classmates’ accuracy on EF tasks was not associated with individual students’ EF growth.

This study provides initial evidence for an association between classmates’ EFs and individual students’ in middle childhood using group-based EF assessments. Higher average levels and higher variability in classmates’ EFs, as measured by students’ RTs on direct EF assessments, were linked to increased growth in individual students’ EFs. In contrast, classmates’ accuracy on EF tasks was not associated with individual students’ growth in accuracy scores. Our results suggest that speed on EF tasks may be more important for classroom interactions and learning than accuracy on EF tasks. Further, this study highlights the importance of peer interactions for EFs in middle childhood. This work has implications for how students are assigned to classrooms and how teachers group students for learning activities.

Authors

• Jenna E. Finch, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
  Presenting Author

• Elisa B Garcia, SRI International
  Non-Presenting Author

• Michael Sulik, Stanford University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Jelena Obradovic, Stanford University
  Non-Presenting Author