Causal Impacts of Schooling on Children’s Cognitive and Brain Development

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Abstract

The transition into formal schooling represents a major step in almost every child’s life. Empirical studies show that schooling has a strong impact on children’s general intellectual abilities beyond gains in specific skills and factual knowledge. However, we know less about how schooling causally impacts the development of basic cognitive and brain functioning, and their implications for academic outcomes. Gaining a better understanding of how schooling shapes neurocognitive development, and the individual differences therein, is imperative to bridge the gap between developmental cognitive neuroscience and educational practices. Quasi-experimental approaches such as school cutoff and regression discontinuity designs are well-suited for disentangling the effects of schooling and chronological age that are typically confounded, by taking advantage of the arbitrariness of official cutoff dates that determine when children will begin formal schooling. In this symposium, we will present three ongoing studies that utilize such designs to investigate the causal impact of schooling on children’s brain and cognitive development. The presentations cover different aspects of cognitive control (working memory, inhibitory control, error monitoring) and their neural correlates, using near-infrared spectroscopy and event-related potentials techniques. Following this, the discussant will summarize the main insights from the literature on how schooling causally shapes children’s development, incorporating the new findings of the three presentations and pointing out challenges as well as directions that future studies should target. This symposium is timely for fuelling a growing momentum for applying quasi-experimental approaches to examine when and how schooling shapes children’s development.

Sub Unit

• Education, Schooling

Chair

• Yee Lee Shing, Goethe University Frankfurt

Discussant

• Frederick J Morrison, University of Michigan - Ann Arbor

Individual Presentations

• An Early Start to Schooling Improves Visual Working Memory Performance - Presenting Author: Sobanawartiny Wijeakumar, University of Nottingham; Non-Presenting Author: Courtney McKay, University of Stirling; Non-Presenting Author: Eva Rafetseder, University of Stirling; Non-Presenting Author: Yee Lee Shing, Goethe University Frankfurt

• Disentangling Age and Schooling Effects on Inhibitory Control Development - Presenting Author: Yee Lee Shing, Goethe University Frankfurt; Non-Presenting Author: Sobanawartiny Wijeakumar, University of Nottingham; Non-Presenting Author: Courtney McKay, University of Stirling; Non-Presenting Author: Eva Rafetseder, University of Stirling

• The Impact of School Experience on Cognitive Control Processes - Presenting Author: Jennie K Grammer, University of Virginia - Charlottesville; Non-Presenting Author: Elif Isbell, University of California Merced; Non-Presenting Author: Matthew H Kim, University of Kentucky; Non-Presenting Author: William Gehring, University of Michigan; Non-Presenting Author: Chad Hazlett, University of California, Los Angeles; Non-Presenting Author: Frederick J Morrison, University of Michigan - Ann Arbor