Contrasting executive function development among primary school children from Hong Kong and Germany
- PDF / 513,952 Bytes
- 21 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 86 Downloads / 173 Views
Contrasting executive function development among primary school children from Hong Kong and Germany Katharina Schirmbeck 1 Stephanie W. Y. Chan 2
& Nirmala Rao
2
& Claudia Maehler
& Rhoda Wang
2
& Ben Richards
2
&
1
Received: 14 April 2020 / Revised: 6 August 2020 / Accepted: 23 November 2020 # The Author(s) 2020
Abstract
Previous research findings indicate that young children from East Asia outperform their counterparts from Europe and North America on executive function (EF) tasks. However, very few cross-national studies have focused on EF development during middle childhood. The current study assessed the EF performance of 170 children in grades 2 and 4 from Hong Kong (n = 80) and Germany (n = 90) in a cross-sectional design. Children completed tasks assessing the main components of EF, namely inhibition (child-friendly Stroop task), updating (Object Span task), and shifting (Contingency Naming task). Results of multilevel models showed that all three EF measures differentiated well between younger and older children across the full sample. However, contrary to our hypothesis and previous research, we did not find any significant differences in EF performance between children from Hong Kong and Germany at primary school age. Our findings highlight the possibility that issues related to the measurement of EF and features specific to Hong Kong and Germany underlie our results. Keywords Executive functions . Cross-national . Middle childhood . Primary school
Introduction An emerging body of research indicates that basic cognitive processes, such as executive functions (EF), are influenced by cultural contexts. Cross-national differences in children’s EF development have been previously demonstrated (Imada et al. 2013; Legare et al. 2018; Tran et al. 2019). In
* Katharina Schirmbeck schirmbeck@uni–hildesheim.de
1
Institute for Psychology, University of Hildesheim, Hildesheim, Germany
2
Faculty of Education, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China
K. Schirmbeck et al.
particular, preschool children from East Asia have been shown to outperform their counterparts in Europe and North America on EF tasks (Lan et al. 2011; Oh and Lewis 2008; Sabbagh et al. 2006; Schmitt et al. 2019). Understanding cultural influences on children’s EF development has been a subject of scholarly interest for over a decade (Schirmbeck et al. 2020). However, research assessing differences in EF across multiple countries in children beyond the preschool years is still scarce, with only a handful of cross-national studies focusing on middle childhood and adolescence (Ellefson et al. 2017; Imada et al. 2013; Wang et al. 2016). While early childhood is considered a sensitive period for EF development (Zelazo et al. 2016), EF performance is of high relevance throughout childhood and adolescence, predicting life outcomes such as academic achievement well beyond the preschool years (Bull et al. 2008; Mazzocco and Kover 2007; McClelland et al. 2013; Vitaro et al. 2005). Research on brain maturation further emphasizes t
Data Loading...
