Children attending two primary schools in Zarqa, Jordan, showed different patterns of cognitive test performance compared with children in Irbid, according to an ecological cross-sectional study published in BMC Pediatrics.
After adjustment for selected sociodemographic control variables, children at School A in Zarqa scored lower than the Irbid reference group on Visuomotor Organization, by 4.25 points, with a 95 percent confidence interval of 5.67 to 2.84 points and a p value below 0.001. The same school also scored lower on Thinking Operations, by 1.74 points, with a confidence interval of 3.15 to 0.33 points and a p value of 0.012, although the authors note this result was less consistent across models.
The pattern at School B in Zarqa was different. Children there scored higher than the Irbid reference group on Thinking Operations, by 3.38 points, with a confidence interval of 2.00 to 4.75 points and a p value below 0.001, and they did not differ significantly on Visuomotor Organization. Motor Praxis scores did not differ significantly between school groups, although the study reports that this domain showed a marked ceiling effect and low internal consistency, which limits the interpretability of that finding.
The authors are careful to frame these results as school-level differences rather than effects of individual PM10 exposure. Because exposure was assessed at the area and school level and not for individual children, the findings are associations with school-area environmental context and do not show that PM10 caused the observed differences in cognitive performance. This is a central limitation of the ecological design, in which group-level measurements are used and individual exposure histories remain unknown.
The study also addresses a gap the authors identify in the existing literature. Although executive functions and other higher-order cognitive processes have been investigated in previous studies of childhood air pollution exposure, they note that relatively limited evidence is available regarding specific cognitive and cognitive-motor domains among young school-aged children in Middle Eastern populations, and little is known about whether environmental differences between school settings are associated with distinct aspects of cognitive, perceptual-motor, and praxis-related performance.
The contrasting results between the two Zarqa schools, one showing lower scores in two domains and the other showing higher Thinking Operations scores, illustrate that school-level differences in this setting did not follow a single uniform pattern.
The published version of the article is marked as an early-release, peer-reviewed accepted research paper that carries a permanent DOI and remains subject to further editorial edits before the final Version of Record. For readers, the key takeaway is that the reported associations concern school-area environmental context in two Jordanian governorates, not proven causal effects of particulate pollution on individual children’s cognition, and that further work with individual-level exposure assessment would be needed to test such a relationship.
Subject of Research: Cognitive and cognitive-motor performance of primary school children in Jordanian school areas with different ambient PM10 profiles
Article Title: Cognitive and cognitive-motor performance among primary school children attending schools in areas with different ambient PM10 profiles: an ecological cross-sectional study
Article References: Al-zyoud, A., Abdulla, F., Almomani, F., Hammouri, H., Khader, Y., Hailat, E., & Al-Delaimy, W. K. (2026). Cognitive and cognitive-motor performance among primary school children attending schools in areas with different ambient PM10 profiles: an ecological cross-sectional study. BMC Pediatrics. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12887-026-07930-z
Image Credits: AI Generated
DOI: 10.1186/s12887-026-07930-z
Keywords: PM10, air pollution, children, cognitive performance, cross-sectional study, Jordan, LOTCA, visuomotor organization, thinking operations, school environment, ecological study, public health
News Source: Russell Cooper. (October 29, 2026). School-area PM10 linked to differences in children’s cognitive test scores. Scienmag.
