Executive function development in urban and rural areas in China

Abstract

Executive Function (EF) is an umbrella term which encompasses the goal-directed control functions of the prefrontal cortex. The most widely recognized processes of EF are inhibition, working memory, and set shifting. EF has gained increasing recognition in the recent years for its association with learning and achievement. Further, cross-cultural studies suggest that Chinese children have an advantage in EF compared to their American counterparts (Lan, Legare, Ponitz, Li, & Morrison, 2011; Sabbagh, Xu, Carlson, Moses, & Lee, 2006). Within China, rural-urban gaps in various aspects of child development have been reported in various studies (Zhou, Zhang, & Rao, 2018). Against this background, this paper compared EF in 3- to 5-year-olds in rural and urban areas in China as part of a larger project developing a population-level measure to assess early developmental functioning. Participants were 240 children (50% girls; Mage= 4.65 years, SD = .78). Children were enrolled in four kindergartens in Beijing and three kindergartens in a rural area outside Beijing. Children’s EF was assessed using six tasks that examine cognitive processes including inhibition (activity interruption), working memory (rapid naming, backward digit span, picture visual memory), and set shifting (Dimension Change Card Sort (Zelazo, 2006) and another card sorting task). The six EF tasks (α = .83) were administered to all child participants. It was hypothesized that children from the urban regions will outperform children from rural areas in different EF measures on the basis of prior literature documenting urban –rural disparities in school readiness in China (Zhou, Zhang, & Rao, 2018). A composite EF score was rescaled to have a range from 0 to 100 and had a standard deviation of 19.87. Descriptive statistics demonstrated that EF develops with age. Older children performed better than younger children, and children from the urban regions had higher scores than their counterparts from the rural regions (Figure 1). Moreover, socioeconomic characteristics of participants from the rural and urban areas were different, with participants from the urban areas having higher scores on the family wealth index, higher mother’s education level, and higher father’s education level. Regression analysis indicated that even after controlling for these three socioeconomic variables, urban children still had significantly higher scores (ß = 8.26, t(219) = 2.60, p = .01) (Table 1). The findings suggest that the disparity in EF between rural and urban children cannot be explained by the wealth of the family and parents’ education level. We speculate that urban - rural disparities may be due to variations in the quality of early childhood education (ECE) in urban and rural areas and future studies can directly assess the ECE quality and relate it to child outcomes.