Mengquan Liu

Mengquan Liu is a DPhil student in the Department of Education at the University of Oxford whose research centres on children’s executive functions and their role in academic learning.

During her BSc in Psychology at the University of Birmingham, she worked as a research assistant on projects investigating children’s cognitive development and social information processing. She later completed an MSc in Child Development and Education at the University of Oxford, for which she designed reading-embedded executive function tasks to examine how the executive demands of reading relate to domain-general executive function. From how children interpret social information to how they hold, shift and inhibit information while reading, Mengquan’s work is guided by the question of how children’s cognitive abilities operate within the contexts in which learning takes place. Her doctoral research extends this inquiry to reading and mathematics, examining how executive functions predict children’s achievement in these domains. She is also interested in what children’s executive functioning during learning can reveal about their potential to learn, beyond what they have already attained.