Executive Functions in School-age Children: Influence of Age, Gender, School Type and Parental Education

This study aimed to evaluate whether age, gender, type of school and parental education could predict executive performance in school-age children. Unconstrained, phonemic and semantic verbal fluency tasks (n=402), as well as the Hayling Sentence Completion Test (n=275) and the Random Number Generation task (n=274) were administered to typically developing 6-to-12-year-old children. A hierarchical regression analysis was performed (p0.05). The most significant explanatory models involved child age and parental education, as well as these two variables in addition to the type of school attended by the child. The main individual predictors of executive performance were age and school type. These results may be related to structural and functional alterations in the brain, an increased repertoire of cognitive strategies, the effects of education and the intensity of environmental cognitive stimulation. These findings may contribute to the development of stimulation and intervention programs for EF in clinical and educational settings.Copyright (c) 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.