Causes and Consequences of Inequalities in Children’s Executive Functions
Status: This talk is in preparation - details may change
Status: This talk has been cancelled
This event will be held online. Talk links will be sent to the EP Seminars list a week before the talk. Contact Emma James (emma.james@psy.ox.ac.uk) if you are not on the list and would like to join the seminar.
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.
Date: 7 February 2022, 15:00
Venue: Venue to be announced
Speaker: Emma Blakey (University of Sheffield)
Organising department: Department of Experimental Psychology
Organiser: Emma James
Organiser contact email address: emma.james@psy.ox.ac.uk
Host: Professor Gaia Scerif (University of Oxford)
Part of: Language and Development Seminar Series
Booking required?: Required
Booking email: emma.james@psy.ox.ac.uk
Cost: Free to attend
Audience: Members of the University only
Editor: Halley Cohen