Summary  and introduction to “Development of Executive Functions: Implications for Educational Policy and Practice”

When reading an academic paper in 1993, I remember thinking: “Are they deliberately obfuscating the point or can they just no longer communicate with regular people having been in academia so long.” Admittedly, it was for a class about which I was not very passionate. 

As an adult, I read academic papers to learn more about the attention challenges my children face.  After years of reading other people’s opinions on the research, I have found that first-hand sources are a better choice for me.  

When slogging through an academic paper, I hear that frustration bubble back up when 7 words are used instead of 3 and the scientific definition is repeated over and over again where a layman’s term would do. 

There’s a reason for it though. The academic terms are used to define clearly what the writer is talking about so that no mistake can be made between what is intended and what is inferred. 

So, with all that in mind, and an eye to understanding this particular academic paper, I’d like to give a layman’s overview of the paper:

Development of Executive Functions: Implications for Educational Policy and Practice

Zewelanji N. Serpell1 and Alena G. Esposito2 

Published in: Policy Insights from the Behavioral and Brain Sciences 2016, Vol. 3(2) 203–210© The Author(s) 2016DOI: 10.1177/2372732216654718 bbs.sagepub.com

There’s good news in this paper: Executive Function, which is the ability to plan, and the ability to choose to do things you don’t want to do in order to achieve those plans, is not set in stone! It can improve throughout childhood and adolescence. 

For parents of kids like mine, who struggle with self-control and outbursts (the older) and remembering instructions and facts for any length of time (the younger), this is good news. 

The Academic definition of Executive Function is: 

“Executive functions (EFs) refer to top-down processes (inhibition, working memory, and cognitive flexibility) activated in the context of goal-directed behavior.”

For example:

• Inhibition is used for sitting down and holding your tongue when you want to call out or jump up.
• Working memory allows us to remember the Pythagorean theorem as well as what the teacher said to work on first. 
• Cognitive flexibility provides the ability to switch from a round table discussion to quiet study then back to being asked a question. 

Executive function is incredibly important for life success. This research highlights ways that schools and parents support better executive function development. 

The areas where Executive Function can be supported and trained are: 

• Curricula – classes & pull-outs in school
• Physical Education – exercise
• Computer-based training programs – cognitive training through computer-based games.  

Interestingly, as kids’ brains develop, the neurological brain development that is happening inside doesn’t always correspond directly to big improvements in testing or performing tasks. That doesn’t mean that big improvements aren’t happening in the brain. It’s really a question of how much energy it takes the brain to do those tasks. 

Think of your untrained brain like a HumVee! It’s a gas guzzler (energy,  focus, and concentration guzzler) when you inhibit your impulse to call out or you need to focus on what you’re studying. It takes a lot of attention to not call out or jump up. 

Once you train your brain, it performs more like a Prius. You’re using only a fraction of your energy to maintain attention, suppress an impulse, or focus on schoolwork.  This allows for sustained reading, studying, and classroom interaction without causing a total collapse at 3 PM from the exhaustion from using so much self-control throughout the school day. 

Testing executive function is useful so that teachers, parents, and scientists can assign the right interventions to help kids train their attention skills.  Testing Executive function, however, is not black and white. 

There are fun tests you can administer on yourself, like the Stroop color-word test (not for young kids, they can’t do it yet) or the Hanoi Tower test which tests high-level planning skills. When you do the test, notice not how well you do, but when your brain “glitches” and you have to slow down to process the information. That’s the moment of flooring the gas in HumVee. If you had to spend that energy on everything all day, you might have a meltdown too! 

Executive Function and school outcomes are all tangled together.  The environment at school affects the way kids behave, and executive function skills affect the child’s experience of the school environment. Sleep deprivation, stress, hunger, and other negative impacts, especially the impacts of poverty, are shown to negatively impact executive function. Not surprisingly, you can’t learn when you’re tired, scared, and hungry. 

The 3 areas where executive function interventions are most prevalent and most successful are: 

• School-based curriculum 
• Physical activity (in school and out) 
• Computer-based cognitive training

“Perhaps the most visible approach to building EFs is computer-based cognitive training.“

“Some limited evidence suggests that cognitive training improves children’s performance in math (Holmes, Gathercole, & Dunning, 2009) and reading (García-Madruga et al., 2013; Loosli, Buschkuehl, Perrig, & Jaeggi, 2012).”

If your child struggles with attention, you know that improving reading stamina and math would be transformational in your child’s school experience. If your child struggles with impulsivity, you know that inhibitory control would be transformational for their experience of the classroom.

The most important factor in any training focused on improving executive function examined by this study was practice. Repeated training makes the most improvement.  

If you play a sport or an instrument, you know practice is everything. Practice is important not only for attaining the skill but for “staying sharp” and having to allocate fewer attentional resources to perform the skill. 

Attention, executive function, and all they include are the same as any other learned skill. They take practice.  

At BrainLeap™, our Attention Arcade games train the attention skills underlying the executive function skills of working memory, cognitive flexibility, and inhibitory control.

The challenging part, as a parent, is that when kids need the training the most, they want to do it the least. We all like to be good at things. It’s hard to go for a run when you’ve gained 7 lbs during COVID, but that’s just when you need to do it most (yes, that’s me talking to me). But regular practice, physical exercise, cognitive training, and school curriculums that support attention skills do yield results.  

Read the whole paper here: Development of Executive Functions: Implications for Educational Policy and Practice

And get started training your child’s attention skills — skills that positively affect, like, everything.