Executive Functions, Oral Vocabularies, and Early Literacy Skills Mediate Sociodemographic Gaps in Mathematics and Science Achievement During Elementary School

We investigated whether and to what extent U.S. kindergarten children's executive functions, oral vocabularies, and early literacy skills mediate relations between their sociodemographic background characteristics (i.e., family socioeconomic status, race or ethnicity, biological sex) and stable between-individual levels of mathematics and science achievement across kindergarten to 4th grade. We did so by fitting a random intercept cross-lagged panel model to nationally representative data (N = 9081, Mage = 92.4 months). Cross-lagged relations were relatively stronger from mathematics to science achievement than from science to mathematics achievement. These relations were weaker in earlier grades and stronger in later grades. Autoregressive coefficients were stronger for mathematics than for science and much stronger for each domain during the upper elementary grades. Children's working memory abilities and early literacy skills were the strongest mediators of the relations between their socioeconomic backgrounds and over-time mathematics or science achievement.Educational relevance statementWe observed cross-lagged relations between mathematics and science achievement, particularly during the upper elementary grades and from mathematics to science achievement. We also observed that kindergarten children's executive functions, oral vocabularies, and early literacy skills mediate relations between their sociodemographic background characteristics and mathematics and science achievement. Results suggest that multi-component interventions designed to facilitate learning of both mathematics and science skills might be especially effective if introduced by the upper elementary grades. These multi-component interventions might also be designed to support children's executive functions, oral vocabularies, and early literacy skills instead of only teaching mathematics and science skills. Our findings add to the limited existing work examining over-time relations between mathematics and science achievement and the extent to which executive functions, oral vocabularies, and early literacy skills help to explain sociodemographic gaps in elementary schoolchildren's mathematics and science achievement.