Children's Cognitive Skill Development in Britain and the United States

Robert Michael

No 119, Working Papers from Harris School of Public Policy Studies, University of Chicago

Abstract: The paper compares the cognitive test scores of children in Great Britain and the United States in vocabulary, reading, mathematics and memory of words and numbers. Children age 5-9 in Britain systematically out-perform their U.S. counterparts on reading and mathematics tests, while children age 10-14 show far fewer differences. In many of the comparisons, there are no statistical differences in the distributions of test scores between the British and United States children. The explanation for the observed differences between the younger children in the two nations in reading and mathematics may be the earlier age of entry into formal schooling in Britain. The similarity of the observed skills of the older children in the two nations, given the differences in social and economic conditions experienced by those children, challenges the notion that these differences are critically important in the children's cognitive development.

Keywords: cognitive development; Britain; United States (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2001-07
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://harrisschool.uchicago.edu/about/publication ... ers/pdf/wp_01_19.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 500 Can't connect to harrisschool.uchicago.edu:80 (nodename nor servname provided, or not known)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:har:wpaper:0119

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Harris School of Public Policy Studies, University of Chicago Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Eleanor Cartelli ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).