OxTalks will soon move to the new Halo platform and will become 'Oxford Events.' There will be a need for an OxTalks freeze. This was previously planned for Friday 14th November – a new date will be shared as soon as it is available (full details will be available on the Staff Gateway).
In the meantime, the OxTalks site will remain active and events will continue to be published.
If staff have any questions about the Oxford Events launch, please contact halo@digital.ox.ac.uk
Executive functions are the set of high level cognitive skills underpinning goal-directed behaviour. They develop rapidly in childhood and predict school readiness and academic achievement. A large and robust literature is emerging documenting social gradients in children’s executive functions. Specifically, children from lower socioeconomic homes tend to score lower on measures of executive function compared to their higher socioeconomic peers. In this talk, I’ll present my research examining associations between socioeconomic status and executive functions in early childhood, the knock on effect this has on children’s school readiness and mathematical skills, and I’ll discuss ideas for what we can do to narrow inequalities in executive function development. I will argue that in order for us to best support children, we need to build better models of why the association between socioeconomic status and executive function emerges in the first place.
