The Development of Cognitive Skills and Gains in Academic School Readiness for Children from Low-Income Families

By Janet A. Welsh, Robert L. Nix, Clancy Blair, K. Bierman, K. Nelson. Journal of Educational Psychology, 2010

786 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This study examined developmental associations between growth in domain-general cognitive processes (working memory and attention control) and growth in domain-specific skills (emergent literacy and numeracy) across the pre-kindergarten year, and their relative contributions to kindergarten reading and math achievement. One hundred sixty-four Head Start children (44% African American or Latino; 57% female) were followed longitudinally. Path analyses revealed that working memory and attention control predicted growth in emergent literacy and numeracy skills during the pre-kindergarten year, and furthermore, that growth in these domain-general cognitive skills made unique contributions to the prediction of kindergarten math and reading achievement, controlling for growth in domain-specific skills. These findings extend research highlighting the importance of working memory and attention control for academic learning, demonstrating the effects in early childhood, prior to school entry. We discuss the implications of these findings for pre-kindergarten programs, particularly those designed to reduce the school readiness gaps associated with socio-economic disadvantage.

Subfields: Developmental and Educational Psychology, Education, Statistics and Probability

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/cc2c0134f5d2ca709b76198a9dbde58c91880fab

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Citations in the corpus

The Co-Occurring Development of Executive Function Skills and Receptive Vocabulary in Preschool-Aged Children: A Look at the Direction of the Developmental Pathways. (2014, result): “Interestingly, also similar to our results, Welsh et al. (2010) found that children’s beginning-of-preschool EF skills did predict their end-of-preschool emergent literacy.”
Executive Function Skills, Early Mathematics, and Vocabulary in Head Start Preschool Children (2017, methodology): “J. A. Welsh et al. (2010) found some evidence of shifting as a predictor of growth in numeracy and literacy skills at the end of kindergarten, but a composite measure of both IC and CS was used.”
Executive Function and Reading Comprehension: A Meta-Analytic Review (2018, background): “This research and others (e.g., Fuhs & Day, 2011; Weiland, Barata, & Yoshikawa, 2014; Welsh et al., 2010) provide developing evidence of the reciprocal contributions of executive functions and an array of academic skills, and has important implications for understanding elements of curricula that…”