Although the relationship between socioeconomic status (SES) and science knowledge is well established, the mechanism explaining access to enrichment opportunities and selective attention abilities as mediators of the relationship between SES and science knowledge in preschool. We tested eighty-eight 3-to-5-year-old children on a baseline science knowledge across three different science topics and assessed their selective attention skills using the Track-It task, which requires focusing on a moving target while ignoring multiple distractors (Fischer et al., 2013). We also measured family SES and access to enrichment opportunities via parent report of household income, parents' education and occupations, and children's participation in school and extracurricular activities. Results indicated that access to enrichment opportunities mediated the relationship between economic measures of SES and children's science knowledge. Selective attention skills were not directly realted to science knowledge, and they did not mediate the relationship between SES and science knowledge. Overall these results suggest that it is important to consider both economic and enrichment factors when investigating the effects of SES on science acheivement.
