An Ecological View of Executive Function in Young Children: Variation in and Predictors of Executive Function Skills Over One School Year.

For many years, researchers studied EFs in the laboratory with a focus on understanding an individual child's development and brain processes in a controlled environment. Building on this foundational research, there is a growing interest in EFs in the context of a child's dynamic, social world and the contextual and compositional factors influencing EF development. This paper provides a descriptive view of EFs in 1,112 K-3 children from six schools in Phoenix, AZ. The study's goals were to examine (1) variation in EF scores between and within schools and classrooms, (2) predictors of variation in children's spring EF scores, and (3) individual and compositional predictors of children's spring EF scores. Our findings indicate greater variation in children's EF within schools than between, with very little or no variation arising from differences between schools. Though we observed greater variation within classrooms than between them, a notable amount of variance in children's spring EF scores appears to arise from differences between classrooms. Classroom-level variables, including a fall leave-out classroom mean (without the students' own score) and the number of children in the top or bottom grade-level quartiles in each classroom, were significant predictors of variation in spring EF scores as well as in fall to spring changes in EF. In some cases, the classroom variables were stronger predictors than individual fall scores. Findings suggest that understanding variation and cultivating growth in EF skills requires intervention, measurement, and analytic approaches that extend beyond the individual to include compositional features of the classroom environment. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.