To advance understanding of how social inequalities from childhood might contribute to cognitive aging, we examined the extent to which school context in adolescence was associated with individuals’ cognitive performance more than 50 years later. Using data from 3,012 participants in the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study (WLS), we created an aggregate measure of school-level structural advantage, with indicators such as the proportion of teachers who had at least five years of teaching experience and spending per pupil. Multilevel models indicated that secondary school advantage was associated with small benefits in language/executive function at age 65 among older adults who had lower academic achievement in secondary school. Findings suggest that school advantage is a developmental context of adolescence that has modest implications for intracohort differences in aspects of later life cognition.

中文翻译：

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青春期的学校环境和 50 年后的认知功能


为了加深对童年时期的社会不平等如何导致认知老化的理解，我们研究了青春期学校环境与 50 多年后个人认知表现的关联程度。利用威斯康星州纵向研究 (WLS) 3,012 名参与者的数据，我们创建了学校层面结构优势的总体衡量指标，其中包括具有至少五年教学经验的教师比例以及每个学生的支出等指标。多层次模型表明，中学学业成绩较低的老年人在 65 岁时，中学优势与语言/执行功能的小幅改善相关。研究结果表明，学校优势是青春期的一个发展背景，对以后生活认知方面的队列内差异影响不大。