About this session

Thursday, 11:50 AM - 1:20 PM

Contextually-Sensitive Assessments of Children’s Executive Function Skills and Behaviors in the Global South

The 2030 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and 2022 Tashkent Declaration prioritize equitable quality of early childhood care and education (UNESCO, 2022). To evaluate these efforts, the global research community needs holistic assessments of child development skills. As a universal set of cognitive skills that promote self-regulation and goal-directed behaviors, executive functions (EFs) support early childhood developmental milestones, such as learning and forming social relationships (Obradović & Willoughby, 2019). The evidence that EFs are related to children’s learning and academic achievement (Deer et al., 2020) and predict life-long academic attainment, earnings, and health (Moffitt et al., 2011; Ozawa et al., 2022) has led to an increased interest in EF assessments around the globe. However, the increased interest has surfaced important challenges in the consistency and contextual sensitivity of EF assessment. While direct assessments of EF skills via performance tasks and adult reports of observed EF behaviors in everyday settings have been shown to uniquely predict school outcomes (Obradović et al., 2022; Ahmed et al., 2022), they vary in their ecological validity and capacity to account for EF-relevant contextual and cultural values and expectations (Gaskins & Alcalá, 2023; Jukes et al., 2024). The four papers will showcase efforts to adapt, develop, and validate more contextually-sensitive assessments of EF skills and behaviors in the Global South (Bangladesh, Colombia, Mexico, and South Africa). The symposium will also discuss efforts of the Global Executive Function Initiative to foster greater research capacity to assess and study EFs in children around the globe, and especially in low-resource settings.

Paper #1
Title	Leave no child behind: Validating novel executive function measures representing children’s experiences in rural Bangladesh
Presenting author	Ishita Ahmed, Stanford University, United States

Paper #2
Title	Digital, game-based assessment of children’s SEL skills: Development and validation of the MiniSEL in Colombia
Presenting author	Dr. Nikhit D'Sa, Ed.D., University of Notre Dame, United States

Paper #3
Title	Piloting accessible tablet-based tasks to assess cognitive development in South Africa
Presenting author	Dr. Catherine Elizabeth Draper, Ph.D., SAMRC Developmental Pathways for Health Research Unit, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa

Paper #4
Title	Culturally relevant executive function assessment: A pilot study in Yucatan Mexico and the United States
Presenting author	Dr. Lucia Alcalá, Ph.D., California State University, Fullerton, United States

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Session chair
Jelena Obradovic, Ph.D., Stanford University, United States

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