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

Is EF the New IQ?

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Dramatic role playing is a cornerstone of the EF philosophy. The preschoolers, all four and five years old, actually design the play's action by themselves. For example: "Let's pretend you're the mommy and I'm the baby. I'll get sick, and you'll need to take me to the doctor." Then they act it out, solving problems along the way. The idea is that play of this kind promotes the internalization of rules and expectations and demands mental discipline to stay in character—all cognitive challenges. Importantly, these exercises are not tacked on as a separate teaching, but rather are integrated into every activity of the child's day, from reading to math.

This is a vast oversimplification of a curriculum that has taken years to develop and is grounded in rigorous scientific studies of children's brain development. One concern of EF proponents is that dramatic play and clapping games will seem frivolous, a distraction from drilling kids in fractions and irregular verbs. But Diamond's results say otherwise. As she reported at the recent convention of the Association for Psychological Science in Chicago, kids in both traditional and experimental classrooms were given a battery of EF tests following two years of preschool. The tests were very difficult cognitive challenges that require kids to inhibit their automatic responses. The EF-trained children outperformed the traditionally educated kids on every single test. In fact, the differences were so dramatic after one year that some school officials opted out of the experiment to give all the kids the benefit of EF training.

But there's more. Psychologist Clancy Blair of Pennsylvania State University has shown that preschoolers with sharper executive capability also outperform their more traditional peers in basic skills, especially mathematics, when they hit kindergarten. In other words, as counterintuitive as it seems, early exposure to dramatic play and cognitive games better prepares kids for mastery of traditional academics.

Kids are being expelled from school in startling numbers, even from preschool. Executive skills are disproportionately worse in children from deprived economic circumstances, and these skills may account for up to half of the gap in school readiness between white kids and African-American kids. These are precisely the kids whom the 2001 No Child Left Behind federal education reforms were supposed to help, but under that law, play has been marginalized as a luxury at best and at worst as an impediment to basic skills training and test scores. These results argue that by neglecting basic brain function we may be leaving our kids behind in a much more destructive way—and depriving them of playfulness in the process.

Wray Herbert writes the "We're Only Human . . ." blog at www.psychologicalscience.org/onlyhuman.

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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.