Using Fixed-Effects Analyses to Examine How Neighborhood Structural, Process, and Physical Characteristics Predict Children's Cognitive Skills in a National Cohort of Elementary School Students.

Individual characteristics of neighborhood context, like concentrated socioeconomic disadvantage, are associated with children's cognitive development, including their academic skill development and executive functions. However, questions remain regarding how neighborhood structural, process, and physical features uniquely predict children's cognitive skills when measuring neighborhoods more holistically. Exploiting within-child changes in neighborhood conditions over time in a nationally representative sample of children followed from kindergarten through fifth grade (N ≈ 13,550), this study examined unique associations between structural (i.e., concentrated disadvantage), process (i.e., violent crime, learning resources, and aspects of school quality), and physical (i.e., green space and pollution) characteristics of neighborhoods and children's achievement skills and executive functions. Fixed-effects models demonstrated that increases in neighborhood violent crime and pollution predicted decreases in children's reading and math skills, while increases in neighborhood school quality, learning resources, and green space predicted increases in reading and math. Children's executive functions were better when neighborhood pollution was lower and when school quality was better. Our results suggest that improving neighborhood structure, processes, and physical conditions may foster children's cognitive skill development, especially academic achievement. Educational Impact and Implications Statement: This study documented how neighborhood structural, process, and physical characteristics related to change in children's academic and executive function skills from kindergarten through fifth grade. Specifically, utilizing a representative sample of U.S. elementary school students and rigorous analytic methods that reduce selection bias, we found that increased pollution and violent crime related to declines in academic skills while more learning resources, green space, and higher school-level average achievement related to better academic skills. Executive functions were less mutable by neighborhood conditions; only pollution and school quality predicted children's executive functions (negatively and positively, respectively). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]