Child poverty and cognition: Developmental and educational implications

LIPINA, SEBASTIAN J.

Ciudad del Vaticano

Conferencia; Education. The global Compact.; 2020

Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences

Contemporary theories of human development are framed in the meta-theoretical postulates derived from the systemic-relational approaches (RDS), which emphasize that the biological, psychological and social changes occur through multiple and interdependent relationships between individuals and their contexts across the course of life. According to these approaches, every organism is characterized by being active, self-regulated (adaptive) and complex (nonlinear). What would characterize human development would be the co-evolution or permanent transformation of the biological and social systems that it involves, what means that the directionality of the trajectories is individually variable. In this sense, the RDS approaches emphasize the study and integration of different levels of organization - from the biological / physiological to the cultural and historical - as a means to understand human development throughout the life cycle. The contemporary study of the associations between poverty, cognition, and learning fall within the context of RDS meta-theories. This implies that its approach considers both individual phenomena that occur at the molecular, neural, cognitive and behavioral levels, as well as the developmental contexts in which the individual develops her life (i.e., social, cultural and historical). In this chapter we present a synthesis of: (a) the evidence on the associations between poverty and cognition at different levels of organization, with a focus on those aspects related to the acquisition of learning; (b) the mediation and moderation factors identified in such associations; (c) the impact of different interventions aimed at optimizing the cognitive development of children living in a context of poverty; and (d) the scientific implications of this evidence, according to contemporary perspectives of developmental psychology and cognitive neuroscience.