In the fields of education, sociology and economics, there is a long-standing connection between socioeconomic status (SES) and school outcomes in a wide variety of cultural settings, but these studies have yet to examine the possible mediating effects of domain-general cognitive factors such as executive functions (EF). Addressing this gap and building on evidence for links between EF and numeracy, the current cross-cultural study used a large sample (N = 835) of 9- to 16-year-old children from Hong Kong and the United Kingdom to the examine the independence and interplay of SES and EF as predictors of numeracy skills. Our analyses yielded three key findings: (1) EF consistently predicts numeracy skills across sites and genders; (2) Associations between SES and EF differ by site and gender; and (3) Associations between numeracy skills and SES/EF differ by site and gender. Together with previous findings, our results suggest culture-specific associations between SES, EF and numeracy, indicating that cultural insights may enable impactful shifts in public policy to narrow the achievement gap between children from affluent and disadvantaged families.Recent advances in developmental cognitive neuroscience suggest a link between executive functions (EF) and school achievement. Briefly, executive functions include our ability to reason, plan ahead, multi-task or switch between tasks, sustain attention, delay gratification, and make complex decisions and change dramatically between childhood and adulthood. Children from Asia are widely reported to outperform children from North America Europe on EF tasks, but this evidence is focused almost entirely on young children and largely ignores the question of whether there are cross-cultural differences in EF for older children and adults. This project includes two studies that have been carefully designed to establish the validity, magnitude and universality of any East-West contrast in children’s EF performances. Together, these studies have three key goals: to improve the measurement of children’s EF by developing psychometrically robust, culturally-fair task batteries that are suitable for use across a broad range of ages to enhance our understanding of putative cultural contrasts by examining links between within-group variation in EF performance and parenting factors to explore whether the link between EF and academic achievement show cultural universality and the extent that parental factors influence this link.

Data collection involved experimental tasks (cognitive psychology), questionnaires including demographic questions and achievement tests collected as part of a larger project. The cognitive psychology tasks here are those that measure executive functions. A detailed description of these tasks are linked to a previously published data set available on the UK Data Service (under Related Resources). The demographic questionnaire included age, gender, as well as parental education and occupation levels. Parental education and occupation responses were coded using Hollingshead (1975) index of socioeconomic status. One standardised achievement test was used here - The Raven's Standard Progressive Matrices. Note - a detailed description of the sampling used is available from the UK Data Service site linked to the overall project (under Related Resources).