School changes minds: A meta-analysis shows that schooling modestly improves children's executive functions

Formal schooling places new demands on young children, requiring the inhibition of prepotent responses, sustained attention to instructions, and completion of academic tasks. Does this intense ‘training’ enhance children's general cognitive abilities? Prior research exploits the arbitrary school entry cut-off date as a natural experiment, comparing same-age children in different grades. A schooling effect is noted when higher-grade children outperform age-matched peers in lower grades. However, evidence for this effect on executive functions remains mixed. Here, we use meta-analytic methods to quantify the schooling effect on executive functions for the first time. We identified 12 studies published between 1995 and 2023 (N ≈ 1,611 children, age 4.5 to 9 years, approximately 51 % female), containing a total of 33 effect sizes. A random-effects model combining 14 effect sizes (after accounting for dependencies and exclusions) revealed a small, but robust, schooling effect on children's executive functions (g = 0.24, 95 % CI [0.13, 0.36]). This value provides an important reference point regarding the malleability of executive functions in early childhood.