FMURF Project Overview:

Project Overview: 

Executive function (EF) skills are foundational for children’s early learning and academic adjustment and are routinely assessed in school settings to inform instructional decisions and referrals for additional services (Byrnes et al., 2019; Miller-Cotto et al., 2025). Despite their widespread use, EF assessments rely on implicit assumptions that children’s performance reflects stable underlying abilities and is not meaningfully shaped by features of the assessment context or the social dynamics of the testing situation (Thomas, 2023). Developmental and sociocultural theories suggest, however, that children’s cognitive performance may be sensitive to contextual cues and interpersonal dynamics, particularly in evaluative settings (Sternberg, 2004; Beliock, 2008; Byrd, 2012; Yosso, 2016; Heyes, 2018; Lyons et al., 2018; Del Toro & Wang, 2022).

The present study examines whether features of the school-based assessment environment, specifically assessor–child racial match, are associated with kindergarten-aged children’s performance on widely used EF tasks. This project is part of an ongoing multi-site investigation of how assessment context and assessor characteristics shape children’s observed EF performance. Here, we report findings from the school-based component of data collection currently underway in Berkeley, California, and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.