What exactly is "executive functioning" and what impact does it have on learning and academic success?

Question

The term "executive functioning" has been a frequently used buzzword in recent years when talking about students and academic success. But what does it actually mean? How much does executive functioning really matter? Does it have an impact on a student's ability to learn, develop, and/or succeed? And what, if anything, can be done to improve it?

Answer 1

Executive function (and self-regulation) skills are what enable us to plan, focus our attention, remember instructions, and juggle tasks successfully. Our brains need executive function skills to filter out distractions, prioritize, set goals and take action to achieve them, and control our impulses.

Executive function and self-regulation skills depend on 3 areas of brain function:

1. Working memory = the capacity to hold and work with information in our heads over short periods of time.
2. Cognitive/Mental flexibility = the capacity to switch gears and adjust to changed demands, priorities, or perspectives. It enables us to apply different rules in different settings.
3. Self-control = the capacity to control and focus our thoughts and impulses so we can resist temptations and distractions, instead pausing to think before we act. It enables selective, focused, and sustained attention, prioritization, and action.

These skills are intertwined and operate most effectively in coordination with each other. Children aren’t born with these skills but all children are born with the potential to develop them. Some children may need more support than others to develop these skills.

How important are these skills to academic success?

Executive function skills are the foundation for school readiness. In other words, strong working memory, cognitive flexibility, self-control, and attentional skills are the foundation on which children’s abilities to learn to read, write, and do math are built. Another way to think about it is that executive function supports the how of learning (the process of focusing, remembering, planning), which enables students to effectively and efficiently master the what of learning (the content).

How are these skills developed?

Adults create a structure that helps children use the executive function skills they are developing to the best of their abilities, using techniques like establishing routines and breaking big tasks into smaller chunks. These techniques are called "scaffolding" because they support children's developing executive function skills until they can perform them on their own. Over time, the goal is to reduce the scaffolding, allowing children to develop more autonomous mastery of these skills.

There are numerous activities and strategies that teachers use to scaffold and promote executive function skills. The approaches selected will depend on such factors as the student's age and the particular challenges that student encounters in daily routines.

Who am I?

I was a classroom teacher for 20 years in a highly competitive NYC private school. I made it my mission to educate myself about executive function and self-regulation -- attending a number of educator workshops and reading the most current literature on the topic -- so that I could better help my students develop the skills they needed for optimal learning.

I would love to help your child with strategies for improving such skills as working memory, cognitive flexibility, time management, and task initiation.

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