Poster #53 - It's not what you think! Adopted children's executive function impacts educational engagement.

• In Event: Poster Session 17

Abstract

As of 2020, a total of 1,446,818 children were in foster care, 181,285 were waiting to be adopted, and 57,881 children were adopted (U.S. Children’s Bureau, 2021). Studies of children that were adopted (adoptees) largely focused on behavioral and psychological outcomes (see Brumble & Kampfe, 2011 for review), and more recently academic achievement (e.g., Turski & Del Tufo, 2022) and academic engagement (Lutes et al., 2016). Executive function (EF) is an umbrella term referring to cognitive processes linked to the prefrontal cortex in the brain (Diamond, 2013). Despite the major impact of EF on educational attainment (e.g., Decker & Omori, 2009) very few studies investigated the EF of adoptees. Moreover, adoptees' pre-adoptive environments vary. The studies that have investigated the EF of adoptees largely focused on those who spent a substantial portion of their childhoods in institutions (Behen et al., 2008; Eigsti et al., 2011; Pollak et al., 2010). Therefore, to gain a more cohesive understanding of adoptees’ EF, the current study focuses on adoptees from diverse pre-adoptive backgrounds. We used a nationally representative sample of participants from the National Institute of Health Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD Study®). This included 198 (99 male) children from adopted families. At study enrollment, the average age of the adopted participants was 10.69 years (SD = 0.829). A confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was used to examine the factor structure of adoptees’ EF and academic engagement. EF included direct and self-reported measures, including the emotional Stroop task (affective regulation), emotional regulation questionnaire (affective regulation), youth BRIEF problem monitor (monitoring), youth behavioral inhibition/behavioral approach systems scales (inhibition/reward-seeking), and the youth wills problem solving scale (self-control/planning). Academic engagement was predicted by the number of times the child reported that they were absent over the last four weeks of school. The number of absences reported by the child was confirmed by a parent. Academic engagement also included adoptees’ perception of their teachers (e.g., “I get along with my teachers”), school (e.g., “I like school a lot”), and their academic performance (e.g., “Getting good grades is important to me”). Children’s responses were coded on a 4-point Likert scale. A latent variable path analysis (LVPA) was conducted to investigate the effect of adoptees’ EF on their academic engagement. LVPA was chosen because it allowed us to combine measures of EF and academic engagement on different scales. Age, sex, native language, and socioeconomic status of the adoptive family were included as model covariates. To indicate a good model fit, we evaluated the models against the following guidelines. The RMSEA estimates should be lower than 0.05 (Hu & Bentler, 1999) with 90% confidence intervals, and the CFI should be higher than 0.90 (Bentler & Bonett, 1980). In line with our primary hypothesis, greater EF positively impacted academic engagement in adoptees. Additionally, this relation was moderated by the sex and native language of the adopted child. This indicates much more variability in the EF of adoptees than has been previously reported.

Authors

• Tamara Turski, University of Delaware
  Presenting Author

• Stephanie Del Tufo, University of Delaware