Abstract
Previous work has shown that individual differences in executive function (EF) are predictive of academic skills in preschoolers, kindergartners, and older children. Across studies, EF is a stronger predictor of emergent mathematics than literacy. However, research on EF in children below age three is scarce, and it is currently unknown whether EF, as assessed in toddlerhood, predicts emergent academic skills a few years later. This longitudinal study investigates whether early EF, assessed at two years, predicts (emergent) academic skills, at five years. It examines, furthermore, whether early EF is a significantly stronger predictor of emergent mathematics than of emergent literacy, as has been found in previous work on older children. A sample of 552 children was assessed on various EF and EF-precursor tasks at two years. At age five, these children performed several emergent mathematics and literacy tasks. Structural Equation Modeling was used to investigate the relationships between early EF and academic skills, modeled as latent factors. Results showed that early EF at age two was a significant and relatively strong predictor of both emergent mathematics and literacy at age five, after controlling for receptive vocabulary, parental education, and home language. Predictive relations were significantly stronger for mathematics than literacy, but only when a verbal short-term memory measure was left out as an indicator to the latent early EF construct. These findings show that individual differences in emergent academic skills just prior to entry into the formal education system can be traced back to individual differences in early EF in toddlerhood. In addition, these results highlight the importance of task selection when assessing early EF as a predictor of later outcomes, and call for further studies to elucidate the mechanisms through which individual differences in early EF and precursors to EF come about.
Highlights
Individual differences in executive function (EF) in early childhood have often been shown to be predictive of later academic skills (Blair and Razza, 2007; McClelland et al, 2007; Bull et al, 2008; Clark et al, 2010; Geary et al, 2012)
The Structural Equation Model (SEM) model in which the latent factor early EF was modeled as a predictor of the latent factors emergent mathematics and literacy, with parental education, home language, and receptive vocabulary at age 2 controlled, fitted the data well, RMSEA = 0.05, CFI = 0.93, SRMR = 0.05 (n = 552)
The current longitudinal study is the first to investigate the predictive value of early EF in two-year-olds for emerging academic skills over a three-year time interval
Summary
Individual differences in executive function (EF) in early childhood have often been shown to be predictive of later academic skills (Blair and Razza, 2007; McClelland et al, 2007; Bull et al, 2008; Clark et al, 2010; Geary et al, 2012). Most of the earlier work on the predictive value of EF for later academic performance has focused on kindergartners and school-aged children (Blair and Razza, 2007; Mazzocco and Kover, 2007; Bull et al, 2008; Best et al, 2011; Toll et al, 2011; Willoughby et al, 2012). The rapid development of EF may imply that EF should not be assessed too early, as the construct might be unstable
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