Executive Functions and Academic Achievement: Current Research and Future Directions

Abstract

Infant and Child DevelopmentVolume 23, Issue 1 p. 1-3 EditorialFree Access Executive Functions and Academic Achievement: Current Research and Future Directions First published: 12 February 2014 https://doi.org/10.1002/icd.1836Citations: 5AboutSectionsPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Executive functions (EFs) are key components of cognition that allow us to respond flexibly to our environment and engage in deliberate, goal-directed thought and action. These processes undergo great changes throughout child and adolescent development (see Diamond, 2013, for a review). Studying these changes can help us to understand how children, who often ‘act without thinking’, develop into mature, responsible adults, able to plan and control their actions. In April 2012, the ‘Development of Executive Functions Workshop’ was held at Utrecht University, the Netherlands, and brought together 100 delegates from across Europe and beyond, to discuss their latest findings and recent advances in this field. One of the meeting's key themes was executive function and academic attainment, and it is from this workshop that the current special issue arose. The body of literature on the association between executive function and academic attainment in reading and literacy(e.g., Blair & Razza, 2007; Christopher et al., 2012), mathematics (e.g., Cragg & Gilmore, in press; Friso-van den Bos, van der Ven, Kroesbergen, & van Luit, 2013; Raghubar, Barnes, & Hecht, 2010) and science (e.g., Nayfeld, Fuccillo, & Greenfield, 2013) is rapidly growing. Currently, a critical mass of studies exists in this field, which allows for synthesis of study findings across countries and educational settings. As such, we believe a special issue about executive function and academic attainment is timely. The current special issue has a broad scope; it includes studies across different age groups (pre-schoolers through to early adolescents), countries (U.S., the Netherlands, Scotland and England), disciplines (maths, literacy/vocabulary and science), statistical methods and significant diversity in children's socio-economic backgrounds. In addition, the papers that form this special issue are each characterized by adopting a strong methodological approach. For example, Henry, Messer and Nash present a solid intervention study to promote working memory in primary school children, with follow-up assessments at 6 and 12 months. Kegel and Bus investigate how change in EF is related to change in alphabetic skills using a fixed effects analysis to control for time stable confounder variables, rather than statistically controlling for selected confounder variables as is more often the case. Furthermore, Stevenson, Bergwerff, Heiser and Resing include dynamic measures of reasoning in conjunction with measures of working memory to optimize the prediction of academic achievement. Both the Weiland, Barata and Yoshikawa and the Kolkman, Kroesbergen and Leseman studies use a latent factor approach to EF and working memory, respectively, thereby minimizing the influence of measurement error in their young samples. Rhodes, Booth, Campbell, Blythe, Wheate and Delibegovic assess academic attainment in Biology using a teaching session designed specifically for the study, so that specific hypotheses about the association between EF and academic learning in this subject area could be tested. Finally, five out of the six studies in the current special issue adopt a longitudinal approach, demonstrating that early EF skills predict growth in academic attainment over time. Despite the general consensus across the studies in this special issue that EF is important for academic achievement, the study by Henry et al. showed that training working memory through adaptive and motivating 1-on-1 sessions improves working memory with large effect sizes but does not improve academic achievement. Thus, near but not far transfer effects of working memory training were observed in this study; a finding that is similar to that of a recent meta-analysis in this field (Melby-Lervåg & Hulme, 2013). Henry et al. speculate in their discussion that through training working memory, children's strategies to deal with processing complex information might improve, and they may also potentially improve in dividing attention between storing and processing information at the same time. However, given the strong relationship between EF and academic achievement demonstrated in correlational studies, the question arises as to why this trained improvement in working memory does not generalize to other skills and impact on academic achievement. The measures of academic achievement used by Henry et al. comprise mostly factual assessment (i.e., number and spelling knowledge, word reading). The only far transfer effect that was observed was on reading comprehension (but note that no pre-test measure of this skill was administered), which involved reading passages of text and answering questions about what children had read: i.e., requiring processing of complex information similar to the working memory tests. Rhodes et al. also showed that working memory was only important for conceptual understanding rather than factual knowledge in their sample. Thus, the role of working memory in academic achievement may be particularly evident in tasks that require complex information processing and integrating abstract ideas, such as in reading comprehension (Henry et al.), conceptual learning in science (Rhodes et al.) and the mapping of symbolic numbers to quantities (Kolkman et al.). Given the now well-established relation between executive function and academic achievement, a number of important questions arise as to how to move the field forward. First, there is a need to move away from merely describing the associations observed towards studying the mechanisms through which EF supports academic achievement. For example, does EF support receptive vocabulary learning (Weiland et al.) by generating strong representations of objects and their name in working memory so that links can be made, and/or by suppressing interference from competing labels? The role of EF also needs to be studied alongside domain-specific predictors of academic achievement, as suggested by Kolkman et al., in order to determine the relative contribution of domain-general and domain-specific skills, as well as how they interact. This more detailed understanding will allow us to build stronger theoretical models, which can then inform intervention strategies. A challenge lies in bringing knowledge from developmental research studies, such as those in the current issue, to educational practice (Weiland et al.). Also, there is a need to investigate how the classroom context and instructions can be optimized to support EF at different ages and for individual children (Rhodes et al., Stevenson et al.). A further challenge lies in designing the most optimal battery of tests that educational psychologists can use to predict children's future school performance. Studies in the current issue suggest that such a battery may consist of a combination of domain-general executive function and dynamic reasoning (i.e., feedback needs) measures as well as domain-specific academic measures (Kolkman et al., Stevenson et al.). This special issue highlights the contribution that executive functions make across a wide range of academic skills while showcasing the variety of methods that can be employed to study this topic. We hope that the papers that form this special issue inspire researchers to build further upon the solid foundations of current knowledge in this area and address the outstanding questions and issues that they raise. REFERENCES Blair, C., & Razza, R. P. (2007). Relating effortful control, executive function, and false belief understanding to emerging math and literacy ability in kindergarten. Child Development, 78, 647– 663. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8624.2007.01019.xWiley Online LibraryCASPubMedWeb of Science®Google Scholar Christopher, M. E., Miyake, A., Keenan, J. M., Pennington, B., DeFries, J. C., Wadsworth, S. J., … Olson, R. K. (2012). Predicting word reading and comprehension with executive function and speed measures across development: A latent variable analysis. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 141(3), 470– 488. doi:10.1037/a0027375CrossrefPubMedWeb of Science®Google Scholar Cragg, L., & Gilmore, C. (in press). 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