The Influence of the Parents' Educational Level on the Development of Executive Functions

TLDR

Information on how educational variables affect executive function development is scarce. The study examined how parents’ education level and school type relate to children’s executive function test scores. Researchers assessed 622 children (5–14 years) from Colombia and Mexico, grouped by age, gender, and school type, using eight executive‑function tests from the Evaluación Neuropsicológica Infantil battery. Results showed age influenced all test scores, school type affected most tests, and children’s verbal scores were strongly linked to parents’ education, indicating that parental education partly explains performance differences between public and private schools.

Abstract

Abstract Information about the influence of educational variables on the development of executive functions is limited. The aim of this study was to analyze the relation of the parents' educational level and the type of school the child attended (private or public school) to children's executive functioning test performance. Six hundred twenty-two participants, ages 5 to 14 years (276 boys, 346 girls) were selected from Colombia and Mexico and grouped according to three variables: age (5-6, 7-8, 9-10, 11-12, and 13-14 years), gender (boys and girls), and school type (private and public). Eight executive functioning tests taken from the Evaluacion Neuropsicologica Infantil; Matute, Rosselli, Ardila, & Ostrosky, in press) were individually administered: Semantic Verbal Fluency, Phonemic Verbal Fluency, Semantic Graphic Fluency, Nonsemantic Graphic Fluency, Matrices, Similarities, Card Sorting, and the Mexican Pyramid. There was a significant effect of age on all the test scores and a significant effect of type of school attended on all but Semantic Verbal Fluency and Nonsemantic Graphic Fluency tests. Most children's test scores, particularly verbal test scores, significantly correlated with parents' educational level. Our results suggest that the differences in test scores between the public and private school children depended on some conditions existing outside the school, such as the parents' level of education. Implications of these findings for the understanding of the influence of environmental factors on the development of executive functions are presented.