The academic achievement gap due to socioeconomic status is a social issue of great concern, and its mechanism of action has attracted extensive interest among scholars. Among them, an individual's executive function may be an important mediating factor. Several previous studies have identified the mediating role of executive functioning between socioeconomic status and academic achievement, but most of them are correlational studies with incomplete consistency of findings, and few studies have examined age differences in the mediating role of executive functioning. Therefore, this study used three sub-studies to examine the relationship between socioeconomic status, executive functioning and academic achievement, and age differences in the mediating role of executive functioning.
Study 1 used meta-analytic structural equation modelling to integrate 70 empirical studies, published and unpublished before November 2023, to examine the mediating role of executive functioning between socioeconomic status and academic achievement, and the moderating role of age. Results indicated that executive functioning partially mediated the relationship between socioeconomic status and academic achievement. Age moderated the relationship between executive functioning and academic achievement, with the amount of both effects diminishing with age.
In the second study, a cross-sectional study was conducted to investigate the relationship between socioeconomic status and academic achievement, the mediating role of executive function and the moderating role of age in 344 primary school students from grades 2 to 6. The results showed that socioeconomic status was significantly correlated with academic achievement, and executive function was significantly correlated with academic achievement, but no correlation was found between socioeconomic status and executive function. By further examining the regulating effect of age on executive function and academic achievement, we find that executive function has different effects on children's academic achievement in high and low grades. Specifically, the inhibitory control components of executive function can predict children's Chinese and math achievement in low grades; In the upper grades, the working memory component of executive function predicted math achievement.
In study 3, 78 primary school students in grade 3 of Study 2 were selected as subjects in a randomized controlled experiment. They were divided into the executive function training group and the control group, and the changes of executive function and academic performance in the two groups were investigated. The results showed that the training group significantly improved task performance during executive function training, but no immediate transfer effect was found in untrained executive function tasks and academic achievement.
The conclusion of this study is that executive function plays a partial mediating role between socioeconomic status and academic achievement. Executive function can predict academic achievement, and the predictive effect decreases with age. Short-term cognitive intervention training can improve the performance of executive function tasks.
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