EF: The School Skill That May Matter More Than IQ | Newsweek Voices - Wray Herbert

Why the ability to resist distraction, a skill scientists call "executive function," may be more important to academic success than traditional measures of intelligence.

Jun 4, 2008 | Updated: 10:27 a.m. ET Jun 4, 2008

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Most people can recall a kid from grade school who couldn't stay seated, who talked out of turn and fidgeted constantly, whose backpack overflowed with crumpled handouts and who always had to ask other kids what the homework assignment was. Those kids weren't bad kids, but they seemed to have absolutely no self-control, no internal disciplinarian to put a brake on their impulses, to keep their attention focused. Not surprisingly, they were almost always lousy students as well.

This kind of student has been tagged with a variety of labels over the years: antisocial personality, conduct disorder, stupid. But recent advances in psychology and brain science are now suggesting that a child's ability to inhibit distracting thoughts and stay focused may be a fundamental cognitive skill, one that plays a big part in academic success from preschool on. Indeed, this and closely related skills may be more important than traditional IQ in predicting a child's school performance.

The scientific name for this set of skills is "executive function," or EF. It's an emerging concept in student assessment and could eventually displace traditional measures of ability and achievement. EF comprises not only effortful control and cognitive focus but also working memory and mental flexibility—the ability to adjust to change, to think outside the box. These are the uniquely human skills that, taken together, allow us keep our more impulsive and distractible brain in check. New research shows that EF, more than IQ, leads to success in basic academics like arithmetic and grammar. It also suggests that we can pump up these EF skills with regular exercise, just as we do with muscles.

Psychologist Adele Diamond of the University of British Columbia has been testing the EF concept in the classroom, with provocative results. In one recent study Diamond convinced a large low-income urban school district (in the northeastern United States) to let her experiment with its preschoolers. Half the classrooms, involving hundreds of children, adopted a new curriculum specifically designed to boost EF, while the other half used a more traditional academic curriculum aimed at basic literacy.

The EF curriculum has many strands, but here are a few just to give a flavor. Instead of keeping the classroom quiet, kids are actually taught and encouraged to talk to themselves, privately but aloud, as a way of helping them exert mental control. In one exercise, for example, the kids have to match their movements to symbols. When the teacher holds up a circle they clap, with a triangle they hop, and so forth. The kids are taught to talk themselves through the mental exercise: "OK, now clap." "Twirl now." This has been shown to flex and enhance the brain's ability to switch gears, to suppress one piece of information and sub in a new one. It takes discipline; it's the elementary school equivalent of saying "I really need stop thinking about next week's vacation and focus on this report."

Here's another example from the classroom. Children tell stories to one another, but kids being kids, they all want to be the storyteller; none wants to just sit and listen. But the reality is that only one can tell a story at a time, so the designated listeners hold a picture of an ear, a prop to remind them that they are waiting their turn to talk. This helps them learn to control their natural instinct to talk out of turn. Eventually the props and private chatter are not needed, but in the beginning they help cognitively immature children stretch their executive muscles.

EH is a descriptive category or paradigm which gives us a way to look at a set of behaviors that are not
'typical' and how they may or may not impair an individual's ability to function successfully at school, work and in their lives in general. Different people define EH in different ways. As a psychologist and an educator, my task is to look at the series of 'symptoms' which have put under that label and to address them. The category called EH has increased my ability to design treatments for individuals based on how these different issues may appear as a group in an individual, how they can be related and how they present themselves across diffferent disorders.

For children with autism this paradigm can be very helpful because these children frequently show a cluster of EH traits. Unfortunately, many parents of children with autism approach school districts with legal threats which demand access to more educational services than most other children, typical or not, will ever have a chance to experience. Special supports and teaching are provided to students whose disability limits their ability to have an equal access to education. Some parents demands go beyond this and essentially they are asking us to 'cure' their children. The cost of these services and of the lawsuits, if we say that we don't feel a specific service is an appropriate use of school funds, is huge and growing.

Parents are beginning to ask the schools to 'cure' their children's executive functioning deficits. We have always addressed the issues which are now called EH. Programs are in place and continue to be studied and refined to teach children skills in areas defined as part of EH such as impulse control and attention deficits.

The difficulty is that we can't possibly 'cure' EH as a disorder because it isn't a specific thing that can be accurately measured. Testing for EH can give us a flavor of the mix of individual disabilities and how they may be impacting a student, so that we can more accurately treat children in these specific areas. Using EH as a specific disability which the schools must treat creates new fodder for the lawsuits demanding the excess services which are draining our educational systems.

I must add as a caveat that I am not demeaning the struggles of children with autism or their parents efforts to provide their child with a meaningful education and the best possible life scenario they can achieve, which is often very good indeed. I have led support groups for parents of children with autism, providing an environment where they can share their worries and frustrations, but also where I can support them in their efforts for their children through any information and insight that I have to offer, and most of all the expertise and support that they can give each other.

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Posted By: cloetev @ 11/12/2008 11:18:42 AM

According to the article executive function is an emerging concept in student assessment. I have been a Psychologist for 15 years and have been assessing children and children with ADHD since then. I have always explained to parents that the main problem in ADHD is the child's lack of executive functioning. I have also attended conferences on ADHD in South Africa early in the 90's were this was discussed. So what's new?
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Posted By: greitmeier @ 11/09/2008 10:20:05 PM

What is EH?
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Posted By: alexi1b @ 06/08/2008 9:26:15 PM

EH is a descriptive category or paradigm which gives us a way to look at a set of behaviors that are not
'typical' and how they may or may not impair an individual's ability to function successfully at school, work and in their lives in general. Different people define EH in different ways. As a psychologist and an educator, my task is to look at the series of 'symptoms' which have put under that label and to address them. The category called EH has increased my ability to design treatments for individuals based on how these different issues may appear as a group in an individual, how they can be related and how they present themselves across diffferent disorders.

For children with autism this paradigm can be very helpful because these children frequently show a cluster of EH traits. Unfortunately, many parents of children with autism approach school districts with legal threats which demand access to more educational services than most other children, typical or not, will ever have a chance to experience. Special supports and teaching are provided to students whose disability limits their ability to have an equal access to education. Some parents demands go beyond this and essentially they are asking us to 'cure' their children. The cost of these services and of the lawsuits, if we say that we don't feel a specific service is an appropriate use of school funds, is huge and growing.

Parents are beginning to ask the schools to 'cure' their children's executive functioning deficits. We have always addressed the issues which are now called EH. Programs are in place and continue to be studied and refined to teach children skills in areas defined as part of EH such as impulse control and attention deficits.

The difficulty is that we can't possibly 'cure' EH as a disorder because it isn't a specific thing that can be accurately measured. Testing for EH can give us a flavor of the mix of individual disabilities and how they may be impacting a student, so that we can more accurately treat children in these specific areas. Using EH as a specific disability which the schools must treat creates new fodder for the lawsuits demanding the excess services which are draining our educational systems.

I must add as a caveat that I am not demeaning the struggles of children with autism or their parents efforts to provide their child with a meaningful education and the best possible life scenario they can achieve, which is often very good indeed. I have led support groups for parents of children with autism, providing an environment where they can share their worries and frustrations, but also where I can support them in their efforts for their children through any information and insight that I have to offer, and most of all the expertise and support that they can give each other.