Assessing executive functioning in Ghanaian Schoolchildren

Despite increased access to education in low-income countries, hundreds of millions of children worldwide reach adulthood without basic literacy and numeracy skills. Moreover, programs designed to improve educational quality in low-income countries have disproportionately focused on academic skills without also addressing important skills necessary to promote engagement and learning in the classroom. These non-academic skills include student motivation as well as Executive Function (EF) competencies like working memory, goal setting, organization, and self-monitoring.

The purpose of this study is to examine how Executive Function competencies and student motivation develop and are linked to school success in one low-income country—Ghana. The study will build on previous research done in Ghana in 2015-16 focused on how to improve the quality of early childhood education (ECE). Professor Wolf and her team will examine (1) how EFs and motivation independently and interactively predict students' academic outcomes; (2) if exposure to high-quality ECE has a long-term impact on students’ EFs and motivation skills in primary school; and (3) how existing measures of students’ home, classroom, and school environments predict EFs and motivation, as well as differences between boys and girls. Their results will inform future work to develop skills-based interventions to improve learning outcomes throughout Ghana.