Links between socioeconomic position and cognitive and behavioral regulation in adolescence: The role of pubertal development.

Adolescent cognitive and behavioral regulation is influenced by multidimensional and multidirectional processes within and across biological and contextual systems that shift throughout development. Key among these influences are distal processes such as early life socioeconomic position (SEP), and proximal processes such as pubertal development, but questions remain concerning how links between SEP, pubertal development, and cognitive and behavioral regulation accumulate and unfold over adolescence. In the current study, and in line with Dr. John Schulenberg's foundational work, direct associations between SEP, puberty, and adolescent cognitive and behavioral regulation were examined; then pubertal timing and tempo were considered as moderators and mediators of links between SEP and adolescent cognitive and behavioral regulation. Data were drawn from the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development, a longitudinal study of 970 youth (52% male; 80% White, 13% Black, and 7% another race/ethnicity). Cognitive and behavioral regulation was measured using direct assessments of working memory, planning, risky decision-making, and impulse control at age 15. SEP included maternal education and family income-to-needs and was averaged from birth to 54 months old; estimates of pubertal timing and tempo were derived using logistic growth curve models from age 9 to age 15. SEP was directly associated with cognitive and behavioral regulation. Pubertal development tended to moderate those links, but rarely mediated them. Specifically, socioeconomic disadvantage along with earlier timing or faster tempo tended to be associated with worse cognitive and behavioral regulation. Overall, findings suggest that pubertal timing and tempo may exacerbate existing environmental constraints.

Pathways from Socioeconomic Status to Early Academic Achievement: The Role of Specific Executive Functions.

Among the many factors contributing to the SES-achievement gap, executive function (EF) skills have received a considerable amount of attention, given their role in supporting academic skill development. While recent work has demonstrated that global EF constructs mediate SES-achievement relations, less attention has been paid to unpacking the role of specific EF components in linking SES to achievement. Data from the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development (N = 1,273) were analyzed to assess direct and indirect associations between SES indicators, preschool EF skills, and first-grade math and reading achievement. Using path analysis, we found parent education and working memory to be uniquely and most predictive of both achievement domains. Further, after controlling for baseline academic skills, verbal ability, and other child- and family-level covariates, only working memory mediated the association between parent education and children's math achievement. These findings offer a comprehensive look at the specific mechanisms through which socioeconomic disadvantage contributes to children's academic development and provide an initial step towards generating more precise targets for policies and interventions aimed at closing the achievement gap.

Developmental cascades and educational attainment.

Developmental cascades describe how systems of development interact and influence one another to shape human development across the lifespan. Despite its popularity, developmental cascades are commonly used to understand the developmental course of psychopathology, typically in the context of risk and resilience. Whether this framework can be useful for studying children's educational outcomes remains underexplored. Therefore, in this chapter, we provide an overview of how developmental cascades can be used to study children's academic development, with a particular focus on the biological, cognitive, and contextual pathways to educational attainment. We also provide a summary of contemporary statistical methods and highlight existing data sets that can be used to test developmental cascade models of educational attainment from birth through adulthood. We conclude the chapter by discussing the challenges of this research and explore important future directions of using developmental cascades to understand educational attainment.