Poster #85 - Urbanicity and Children Cognitive Development: The Mediating Roles of Family and School Environment

• In Event: 3-206 - Poster Session 13
  In Poster Session: PS 13 Section - Education, Schooling

Integrative Statement

According to the bioecological model, variation in developmental outcomes must be understood in relation to the entire ecological system in which growth occurs (Bronfenbrenner & Morris, 1998). Thus, by influencing proximal interactions in a child’s life, urbanicity as a distal context can provides unique contexts for children cognitive development. However, few studies have considered how urbanicity shapes children’s cognition development. Meanwhile, the urban rural disparities in children psychological development, especially cognitive development was ignored. More importantly, the proximal processes linking urbanicity to Chinese children cognitive development were unclear currently. Therefore, it is urgent to understand urban rural disparities in Chinese children cognitive development and explore the potential mechanism.
This research aims to examine the relationship between urbanicity and children’s cognitive development. It is hypothesized that children living in rural areas will be at greatest risk for memory, attention and visual spatial abilities, and these disparities will be explained, at least in part, by differences in their home environment (i.e., parenting style and family learning facilities) and school environment (i.e., school equipment and school psychological environment) across urban, town and rural areas.
The data analyzed in this study were collected from the National Children’s Study of China (NCSC), which is a nationally representative study focused on psychological development of children and early adolescent from 619 schools in China. 12019 students (Mage=11.38 years, SD=1.18) and their parents were involved in this study. The urbanicity and other school environment related variables were reported by the school principles. Children’s cognition indexes and perceived parenting styles were measured by well-established tools. Meanwhile, parents reported social economic status and other demographic variables, such as premature, low weight and attend kindergarten.
Multivariate regression was used to examine the urban rural differences in children cognition development. After controlling demographic variables, the result shown that compare to rural children, urban children have higher scores in memory (β=0.06, p＜0.01), attention (β=0.06, p＜0.01) and visual spatial abilities (β=0.06, p＜0.001). The mediation model analysis shown that the children cognitive developmental benefits of living in urban and town areas were partially mediated by differences in children’s family environment and school environment. For example, urban children perceived less permissive parenting style in comparison to rural children helped explain 15.38% to 21.32% of the differences in children memory, attention and visual spatial abilities in urban and rural areas. As to the mediating role of school environment, the number of school equipment could explain 22.22% to 34.19% of the differences of children cognitive development (More detail results could be seen in table 1). Hence, in the light of these findings, we could conclude that there are urban rural differences in Chinese children cognitive development, and the proximal process, such as family environment and school environment could explain these urbanicity-related disparities.

Authors

• panpan yang, State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning, Beijing Normal University
  Presenting Author

• Zhiying Pan, State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning, Beijing Normal University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Hongyun Liu, Faculty of Psychology, Beijing Normal University
  Non-Presenting Author