State Schooling Policies and Cognitive Performance Trajectories: A Natural Experiment in a National US Cohort of Black and White Adults.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Education is strongly associated with cognitive outcomes at older ages, yet the extent to which these associations reflect causal effects remains uncertain due to potential confounding.

Methods

Leveraging changes in historical measures of state-level education policies as natural experiments, we estimated the effects of educational attainment on cognitive performance over 10 years in 20,248 non-Hispanic Black and non-Hispanic White participants, aged 45+ in the Reasons for Geographic and Racial Disparities in Stroke cohort (2003-2020) by (1) using state- and year-specific compulsory schooling laws, school-term length, attendance rate, and student-teacher ratio policies to predict educational attainment for US Census microsample data from 1980 and 1990, and (2) app

SUBMITTER: Kim MH 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11598670 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature