Cognitive interventions in school settings for children living in poverty

LIPINA, SEBASTIAN J.

Stuttgart

Conferencia; International Conference on Executive Functions; 2014

Ulm Center for Neuroscience and Education

Evidence supports the notion that poverty influences cognitive development through the modulation of different individual and environmental factors. Specifically, the impact of different biological, psychosocial, and sociocultural factors on cognitive development could vary according to the type, number and accumulation of risks, the time in which these factors exert their influences, and the individual susceptibility to them. Complementary, several researchers designed, implemented and evaluated several interventions aimed at optimizing cognitive control performances of children living in poverty during the past decades. The effectiveness of some of these interventions has been related to different aspects of program design, such as comprehensiveness, quality, intensity and directionality of interventions and teachers and family involvement. In these conceptual and methodological contexts, a synthesis four interventions aimed at optimizing the cognitive control processing of preschool- and school-age children from homes without satisfied basic needs (poverty criteria) in the cities of Buenos Aires and Salta (Argentina) are presented. In SIP (n=237), CTP (n=333), and PIC (n=120) interventions, children (3-to 5-years-old) were individually or group trained applying a scheme of 1 session per week for 16 weeks (boarding games and modified school activities based on school curricula). In Mate Marote intervention (n=111), children (6-to 6-years-old) were trained twice a week for 12 weeks (computerized games with adaptive algorithms). Before and after interventions children in all programs were administered a cognitive battery for the assessment of attention, inhibitory control, working memory, flexibility and planning processes (i.e., ANT, Flower/Butterfly, Self-ordered, Corsi Blocks, Tower of London). Impact evaluation on cognitive tasks, transfer on academic achievement, and the identification of predictors of cognitive improvement are presented.