Adolescence marks a period of human development characterized by important changes at the biological and contextual levels. The onset of puberty, ongoing brain maturation, as well as shifting social contexts make adolescence an important period for understanding cognitive development, and in particular executive function given its rapid development during this period. In this article, we describe executive function development and its neurobiological and contextual predictors during adolescence. We also highlight a growing international perspective on executive function development and showcase contemporary methods for studying the complexity of adolescent executive function development across multiple systems of influence.

Adolescent cognitive and behavioral regulation is influenced by multidimensional and multidirectional processes within and across biological and contextual systems that shift throughout development. Key among these influences are distal processes such as early life socioeconomic position (SEP), and proximal processes such as pubertal development, but questions remain concerning how links between SEP, pubertal development, and cognitive and behavioral regulation accumulate and unfold over adolescence. In the current study, and in line with Dr. John Schulenberg's foundational work, direct associations between SEP, puberty, and adolescent cognitive and behavioral regulation were examined; then pubertal timing and tempo were considered as moderators and mediators of links between SEP and adolescent cognitive and behavioral regulation. Data were drawn from the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development, a longitudinal study of 970 youth (52% male; 80% White, 13% Black, and 7% another race/ethnicity). Cognitive and behavioral regulation was measured using direct assessments of working memory, planning, risky decision‐making, and impulse control at age 15. SEP included maternal education and family income‐to‐needs and was averaged from birth to 54 months old; estimates of pubertal timing and tempo were derived using logistic growth curve models from age 9 to age 15. SEP was directly associated with cognitive and behavioral regulation. Pubertal development tended to moderate those links, but rarely mediated them. Specifically, socioeconomic disadvantage along with earlier timing or faster tempo tended to be associated with worse cognitive and behavioral regulation. Overall, findings suggest that pubertal timing and tempo may exacerbate existing environmental constraints.

Developmental cascades describe how systems of development interact and influence one another to shape human development across the lifespan. Despite its popularity, developmental cascades are commonly used to understand the developmental course of psychopathology, typically in the context of risk and resilience. Whether this framework can be useful for studying children's educational outcomes remains underexplored. Therefore, in this chapter, we provide an overview of how developmental cascades can be used to study children's academic development, with a particular focus on the biological, cognitive, and contextual pathways to educational attainment. We also provide a summary of contemporary statistical methods and highlight existing data sets that can be used to test developmental cascade models of educational attainment from birth through adulthood. We conclude the chapter by discussing the challenges of this research and explore important future directions of using developmental cascades to understand educational attainment.

Socioeconomic status (SES)—indexed via parent educational attainment, parent occupation, and family income—is a powerful predictor of children’s developmental outcomes. Variations in these resources predict large academic disparities among children from different socioeconomic backgrounds that persist over the years of schooling, perpetuating educational inequalities across generations. In this article, we provide an overview of a model that has guided our approach to studying these influences, focusing particularly on parent educational attainment. Parents’ educational attainment typically drives their occupations and income and is often used interchangeably with SES in research. We posit that parent educational attainment provides a foundation that supports children’s academic success indirectly through parents’ beliefs about and expectations for their children, as well as through the cognitive stimulation that parents provide in and outside of the home environment. We then expand this model to consider the intergenerational contributions and dynamic transactions within families that are important considerations for informing potential avenues for intervention.

Among the many factors contributing to the SES-achievement gap, executive function (EF) skills have received a considerable amount of attention, given their role in supporting academic skill development. While recent work has demonstrated that global EF constructs mediate SES-achievement relations, less attention has been paid to unpacking the role of specific EF components in linking SES to achievement. Data from the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development (N = 1,273) were analyzed to assess direct and indirect associations between SES indicators, preschool EF skills, and first-grade math and reading achievement. Using path analysis, we found parent education and working memory to be uniquely and most predictive of both achievement domains. Further, after controlling for baseline academic skills, verbal ability, and other child- and family-level covariates, only working memory mediated the association between parent education and children's math achievement. These findings offer a comprehensive look at the specific mechanisms through which socioeconomic disadvantage contributes to children's academic development and provide an initial step towards generating more precise targets for policies and interventions aimed at closing the achievement gap.

Data from the NICHD Study of Early Child Care (N = 1273) were analyzed to assess the longitudinal relations among executive function (EF) components in early childhood (54 months) and adolescence (15 years) and their prediction of academic achievement. We found that after controlling for early achievement, demographic and home environment variables, only working memory at 54 months significantly predicted working memory at 15 years and that working memory was the only significant EF predictor of achievement at age 15. In contrast, all early achievement measures were significant predictors of later achievement. Further, no demographic or home environment variables at 54 months significantly predicted EF at 15, and only maternal education significantly explained variance in adolescent math and literacy achievement. These findings demonstrate the predictability of working memory and highlight its importance for academic outcomes across development. However, the lack of associations of preschool inhibition and attention measures, after controlling for early achievement, demographic and home environment variables, to corresponding measures in adolescence suggests the need for more developmentally sensitive measures of EF. Given that the EF measures used in this study are commonly used in educational and psychological research, more care should go into understanding the psychometric properties across development.

This chapter focuses on the behaviors of the parent toward their children. In much parenting research, a parent’s cognitive ability has been measured by proxy variable using the demographic information on the parent’s education attainment. The chapter reviews why this one variable is important for understanding both parenting beliefs and behaviors and subsequent influence on child development. It deals with an overview of the important role parent education provides as a demographic variable that relays information on the social resources that may be available for parenting children. The chapter outlines the literature on parent and school interactions and how parent educational attainment relates to parental educational involvement in school and home. Parental educational attainment appears to also increase positive parenting behavior across a wide spectrum of child outcomes. The relation between parents’ educational attainment and child development has been established in the parenting literature.