Investigating the links between the subcomponents of executive function and academic achievement: A cross-cultural analysis of Chinese and American preschoolers

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Abstract

Little is known about how components of executive function (EF) jointly and uniquely predict different aspects of academic achievement and how this may vary across cultural contexts. In the current study, 119 Chinese and 139 American preschoolers were tested on a battery of EF tasks (i.e., inhibition, working memory, and attentional control) as well as academic achievement tasks (i.e., reading and mathematics). Results demonstrate that although working memory performance in both cultures was comparable, Chinese children outperformed American children on inhibition and attentional control tasks. In addition, the relation between components of EF and achievement was similar in the two countries. Working memory uniquely predicted academic achievement, with some intriguing patterns in regard to tasks requiring complex processing. Inhibition uniquely predicted counting but did not uniquely predict calculation. Attentional control predicted most aspects of achievement uniformly and was the most robust predictor for reading in both countries. In sum, the data provide insight into both cultural variability and consistency in the development of EF during early childhood.

Introduction

Previous research has shown dramatic differences between Asian and North American children’s executive function (EF) (Oh and Lewis, 2008, Sabbagh et al., 2006). For instance, in Sabbagh et al. (2006) study, where 109 children in China and 107 in the United States performed a battery of EF and theory-of-mind tasks, the Chinese students were found to outperform their American counterparts on all EF tasks but not on theory-of-mind tasks. The current study explores the specificity of such Asian advantage in the relation between various components of EF (inhibition, working memory, and attentional control) and how they relate to (and differentially predict) academic achievement.

The first aim of this study was to investigate cultural differences in the three common components of EF, particularly inhibition and working memory because they have been regarded as the most critical components of EF (e.g., Garon, Bryson, & Smith, 2008). The second aim was to investigate links between Chinese and American preschoolers’ EF and their math and reading achievement. In addition to higher performance on EF tasks, Asian children have been shown to have advantages over their North American counterparts in early math abilities such as counting, place values (Miller and Stigler, 1987, Miura et al., 1988), calculation, and mental mathematics (Brenner et al., 1999, Cai, 1995, Geary et al., 1993). However, to our knowledge, no studies to date have investigated the relations between East Asian children’s EF and their math achievement. In addition, although it has been suggested that EF is more strongly associated with mathematics than with English reading achievement in general (Blair and Razza, 2007, Ponitz et al., 2009), less is known about how the components of EF link to reading achievement. Thus, it is of particular interest to compare the links between EF and reading English with links between EF and reading Chinese.

Understanding these associations can help to determine the extent to which particular components of EF contribute to Asian children’s superior academic achievement. Our study includes samples of preschoolers from two nations: China and the United States. Mathematics, reading (e.g., Rittle-Johnson & Siegler, 1998), and EF skills (e.g., Diamond, Prevor, Callender, & Druin, 1997) undergo dramatic changes during the preschool period. Using a cross-cultural perspective to examine the links between EF and achievement provides insight into the shared ontogenetic organization of these abilities and also describes the universality versus cultural specificity of the associations. Therefore, we have examined how components of EF jointly and uniquely predict various aspects of math and reading achievement.

Although well studied in the adult literature, little is known about the construct of EF during early childhood. Some researchers have suggested that three distinct components comprise EF: inhibition, working memory, and attentional control (i.e., resistance to distracters or the ability to ignore irrelevant stimuli) (e.g., Bronson, 2000). Many studies have used the word shifting as the third component of EF (e.g., Miyake, Friedman, Emerson, Witzki, & Howerter, 2000) and have differentiated two kinds of shifting, attention shifting and response shifting (Rushworth, Passingham, & Nobre, 2002), based on whether the shifting involves selecting aspects of a stimulus or requires motor responses. Both kinds of shifting rely heavily on other EF components (Deák, 2003). Attention shifting, in particular, “is intimately tied to the development of attention and other EF components” (Garon et al., 2008, p. 48). Thus, in the current article, we chose to focus on the three most basic components of EF: inhibition, working memory, and attentional control.

We define EF as separate components operating together in response to academic and behavioral demands requiring self-regulation. We view EF as the set of complex cognitive skills (i.e., inhibition, working memory, and attentional control) involved in controlling, directing, and planning cognition, emotion, and behavior (Blair, 2002, McClelland et al., 2007). Some other studies have argued that all of these components are highly correlated with each other and are essentially a single component during early childhood (Wiebe, Espy, & Charak, 2008). Our first objective was to examine these components of EF and their interrelations cross-culturally, focusing on examining the specificity of the Asian advantage with respect to various aspects of EF. As we will show, working memory is implicated in all three components, and an important part of this aim is examining the extent to which attentional control and inhibition tasks rely on working memory.

Working memory allows one to hold representations in mind for a delayed period of time; it is often conceptualized as being composed of a central executive system and domain-specific short-term storage systems (Baddeley, 2002). It is an essential component of EF because for children to successfully carry out a task, they must perceive and maintain information as they perform. This might be particularly true for carrying out more complicated manipulations such as calculating with numbers and symbols (Espy et al., 2004). As a result, performance on many tasks may be associated with and also bound by working memory capacity (Engle, 2002).

Inhibition occurs when one withholds prepotent behavioral and cognitive responses, for example, when children are first asked to respond to different colors and then to stop responding when a sound beeps. Previous longitudinal (Kochanska, Murray, & Harlan, 2000) and cross-sectional (Carlson, 2005) studies have been done on the development of inhibition. One major question in studying inhibition has been the extent to which working memory is involved in carrying out inhibitory behaviors. Some inhibition measures have a strong working memory component and require children to learn and keep rule information in mind (e.g., “Simon Says” type of tasks); when working memory demands are high (for a given task and a given developmental level), efforts to inhibit a prepotent response are more likely to fail (Roberts & Pennington, 1996). Other measurements of inhibition have lower working memory demands (Carlson, 2005) and sometimes involve motivation and emotion (e.g., delay of gratification tasks). In addition to separating the effect of working memory on inhibition measures, many other studies have focused on associating inhibition with working memory. Participants with strong working memory were found to perform better than those with weak working memory on inhibition tasks in general (Engle, 2002). Notably, individuals with high working memory capacity have performed substantially better on antisaccade tasks that required them to inhibit their proponent response of looking at a distractor (Kane, Bleckley, Conway, & Engle, 2001).

Despite the importance of working memory, some models have suggested that attentional control, or the ability to ignore irrelevant information and focus on tasks, is an important component of EF for successful goal-oriented behaviors (e.g., Iguchi, Hoshi, Tanosaki, Taira, & Hashimoto, 2005). Engle, Kane, and Tuholski (1999) argued that working memory can be called “controlled attention” because it reflects the ability to activate memory representations and either bring them into focus or keep them in focus, particularly when interfered with or distracted. Indeed, performance on attentional control tasks has been found to differentiate preschoolers with low and high working memory span (Espy & Bull, 2005). Because attentional control is likely to be required for all goal-oriented behaviors, we expect it to be generally associated with other components of EF and academic achievement in general.

In sum, differences between components of EF exist, but their relations during early childhood are complicated and poorly understood and little is known about cultural variation in these relations. Notably, previous studies comparing Chinese and American children have focused primarily on inhibition tasks as their sole EF measure. For example, Sabbagh et al. (2006) primarily used EF tasks that mainly measure response inhibition (e.g., Day/Night Stroop, Grass/Snow Stroop, Bear and Dragon task), cognitive flexibility, and impulsivity but did not use those that mainly measure attentional control or working memory.

Cultural differences in EF and academic achievement found so far could be due to several factors, including the predominance of inhibition tasks in the sparse cross-cultural research done to date. An additional source of cultural variation could be due to socialization and differences in specific cultural practices that take place in educational settings. For example, Asian children appear to receive intensive practice in inhibiting behaviors and controlling their attention in normal classroom practice. Lan et al. (2009) reported that Chinese first-grade teachers gave substantially more proactive self-regulatory instructions, such as “do something properly” and “avoid doing something,” compared with American teachers, who often gave reactive instructions after students’ misbehaviors. Chinese teachers’ proactive instructions also included the directive “pay attention.” Such training may allow Chinese students to outperform their American counterparts on some aspects of EF such as inhibition.

Alternatively, it could also be the case that Chinese children perform similarly on all aspects of EF compared with American children. It is possible that the executive system is relatively culture free; thus, children in a diversity of societies could develop EF at similar speeds. Rather than rule out any of these explanatory possibilities explicitly, our objective was to contribute to the growing body of work addressing the cross-cultural relations between EF components and achievement.

Our second objective was to investigate the links between components of EF and three aspects of academic achievement: simple math, complex math, and reading achievement. We distinguished between simple math (defined as counting) and complex math (defined as calculation), anticipating that these are likely to be associated with different components of EF. Preschoolers and kindergarteners with stronger EF achieve higher levels of literacy, vocabulary, and mathematics compared with children with lower EF (McClelland et al., 2007). In another study, Bull and Scerif (2001) found that students with better EF skills (including inhibition, working memory, and task switching) had stronger math abilities compared with students with weak EF skills. The components of EF also predict achievement. Strong working memory skills have been consistently associated with higher academic achievement (Adams et al., 1999, Gathercole and Pickering, 2000). After controlling for general intelligence and attentional control, inhibition was found to uniquely predict math achievement and literacy in kindergarten (Blair and Razza, 2007, Espy et al., 2004). Dobbs, Doctoroff, Fisher, and Arnold (2006) found that children with attentional control difficulties had weaker math skills than their peers with fewer attentional control difficulties. Although these studies have shown the importance of separate components of EF to academic outcomes, few studies have included a battery of inhibition, working memory, and attentional control tasks and studied their unique contributions to various aspects of academic achievement. In addition, research linking components of EF and achievement has been conducted primarily in the United States, so relatively little is known about cultural variation in the development of EF skills. In the current study, we analyzed data collected in the United States and China separately and compared the pattern of relations within each country and across the two countries.

Another objective of this study was to address how these components differentially predict academic skills with variable demands on EF. These include simple math (counting), complicated math (calculation), and reading. According to Geary and Bjorklund (2000), human abilities can be differentiated into primary and secondary abilities. Primary abilities refer to abilities that have a long evolutionary history and are required for survival and adaptation needs such as language and counting small numbers (e.g., counting from 1 to 4). Secondary abilities refer to those culturally necessary and determined abilities that require focused practice to acquire competence such as reading and mathematics. EF is proposed to be vital for acquiring secondary abilities because they require sustained attention and persistence. This hypothesis suggests that the more sophisticated and complex the secondary skill set, the more important EF will be for its acquisition. We used two math tests that we expected would vary in their EF demands. Separating simpler math (e.g., counting) and more complicated processes (e.g., calculation) would allow us to specify the role of EF components in these two skills. We anticipated that working memory would be particularly important for predicting complex math abilities such as calculation, whereas all components of EF would be equally important for counting; that is, no component would be particularly important for counting, but because younger children would still be refining counting skills, they would rely on all EF components even though counting is simpler. In addition, although reading is regarded as a secondary ability, it is unclear whether reading is associated with EF as much as is mathematics. Indeed, some studies have suggested that EF is more strongly associated with mathematics than with reading English (Blair and Razza, 2007, Ponitz et al., 2009). The current study differentiates among simple math, complex math, and reading in addition to investigating the relations of each of the EF components to these academic skills.

Taken together, three aspects of EF have been consistently associated with early math and reading abilities. However, research considering all three components (i.e., inhibition, working memory, and attentional control) and investigating their unique contributions to reading and math achievement is limited, especially in a cross-cultural context. We asked the following research questions:

  • (1)

    Is there cross-cultural variation in children’s performance on a battery of EF tasks that include inhibition, working memory, and attentional control measures?

  • (2)

    Are the relations between EF components and academic achievement similar across the two cultures?

Based on previous findings, we predicted that inhibition and working memory would jointly predict all academic outcomes, particularly math ability. However, because inhibition measures may rely on working memory for remembering rule information (Pickering & Gathercole, 2004), inhibition alone might not uniquely predict math achievement. We anticipated that these associations would be found in both cultures because of the strong neurological and evolutionary basis for developing EF skills.

Section snippets

China

Teachers and children were recruited from two urban public schools in Beijing. The final sample consisted of 119 preschool-age children (46 4-year-olds and 73 5-year-olds). Their average age was 5.02 years (SD = 0.62), ranging from 3.12 to 6.00 years (50% female), at the time of testing. All participants were Mandarin-speaking monolingual children of Chinese origin.

United States

Teachers and children were recruited from two preschools in a rural and suburban county in the Midwest. The final sample consisted of

Analytic plan

Because the missing data rate was very low in both China and the United States (see Table 1 for the final number of participants for each task), listwise deletion was used. Preliminary analysis revealed no significant sex or age difference across cultures (ts < 1.96, ns).

To investigate cultural differences in performance and associations among components of EF, we examined the nature and variability of scores on each EF task and compared the performance of children from the two countries on the

Discussion

Consistent with prior work, Chinese preschoolers significantly outperformed their American counterparts in inhibition and attentional control tasks, with large effect sizes. However, there was no difference in working memory performance between the two countries. The relations between EF components were also similar across cultures, with strong and positive correlations. Finally, the associations between components of EF and aspects of achievement were largely similar across cultures. Working

Conclusion

The current study has demonstrated that although Chinese children outperformed American children on inhibition and attentional control tasks, they did not have advantages in working memory. Despite these differences, the relations between components of EF were similar across cultures; all components of EF were related to each other. Furthermore, the links between EF and mathematics were also similar in China and the United States. Attentional control was generally important for all aspects of

Acknowledgments

This study was supported by a China Seed Grant from the University of Michigan and the Chinese Academy of Sciences–Institute of Psychology.

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