Doomed From the Start ?

Kindergarten difficulties predict academic achievement across primary grades and call for early, targeted interventions, new study finds. 

A team of researchers recently investigated “whether and to what extent deficits in executive functions increase kindergarten children’s risk for repeated academic difficulties across elementary school” (all quotes are from the original article.)
Executive functions (EF) refer to “cognitive processing impairments relating to self-regulation, organization, and goal-oriented behavior.”
More precisely, three types of EF are theorized to be relate dto children’s academic achievement:

• Working memory, or the ability to hold and then manipulate information during a brief time;
• Cognitive flexibility, or the ability to shift attention among multiple aspects of a task as well as update responses using newly acquired information;
• Inhibitory control, or the ability to delay some initial responses while attempting to complete a task.

For their study, the team analyzed data from a very large and representative sample (N=11,010) of U.S. children who had been followed from kindergarten up until the end of third grade and tested on:

• Working memory, through a task requiring them to repeat a series of numbers in reverse order;
• Cognitive flexibility, through a task requiring them so sort cards according to successive rules;
• Inhibitory control, through in-class observartions.

Results showed that children with executive functions deficits in kindergarten “began and remained far below the overall average achievement level” in math, reading, as well as science, across elementary school.
Importantly, this finding held true after controlling for socio-demographic variables.
As noted by the authors, the main conclusion of this study seems to be that early and targeted  interventions are necessary for children at risk for academic difficulties.

Reference: Morgan, Farkas, Wang, Hillemeier, Oh, and Maczuga (2018), “Executive function deficits in kindergarten predict repeated academic difficulties across elementary school”, Early Childhood Research Quarterly.