Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Research exploring cognitive theories of executive function (EF) report positive associations with academic out-comes, but whether such general cognitive theories generalise to when children are exposed to social or economic povertycontexts require more in-depth investigating. This study explores associations between EF and academic achievement for anethnic minority sample aged 8–10 years, from high poverty, urban backgrounds. EF skills were measured using stop-signal (in-hibition), continuous performance (sustained attention), task-switching (cognitive flexibility), spatial span (working memory)and Tower of Hanoi (planning). In addition, we included a popular standardized test of academic ability commonly used byschools to measure literacy, numeracy and science skills and the Raven’s Progressive Matrices task to measure general cognitiveability. EF is differentiated in this sample and is linked to academic achievement. The role of important mediators like cognitiveability are considered in the context of children with high-poverty urban backgrounds.