Executive Functioning:
A Major Key to Academic and Social Success

Executive Function is a term recently discussed to understand how children manage, organize, respond to what they have learned. Simply put, Executive Function (EF) is the ability to interpret, and act upon information. The EF capability of the brain has been referred to as the “orchestra conductor” or “CEO.” EF can be thought of as an umbrella term which covers a collection of interrelated functions responsible for purposeful, goal-directed, problem-solving behavior.

The specific cognitive processes that support executive functioning are predominantly represented in the frontal lobes and basal ganglia, though new research about this complex neural system is continuing to introduce new concepts of how it is organized in the brain.

Dr. Martha Denckla, Director of the Developmental Cognitive Neurology Clinic at the Kennedy Kreiger Institute, describes children with EF difficulties as experiencing hardships planning, organizing, and managing time and space. Dr. F. Zavier Castellanos describes Executive Function as “the ability to delay responses and sustain or shift attention so that an individual can set priorities.”

Most EF difficulties are identified in middle school when organization and independent work are required. However, young children who have difficulty transitioning from one activity to another or experience trouble following a sequence of instructions may be demonstrating EF problems

How Does Executive Function Work? What Happens When it Doesn’t?

Executive Function allows us to:

• Inhibit: The ability to stop one’s own behavior at an appropriate time.
  Example: Children who cannot stop talking or moving and cannot “look before they leap” display an inability to inhibit their behavior.
  
  
• Shift: The ability to move freely from one activity or aspect of a problem to another as circumstances demand.
  Example: Children who are rigid or inflexible, require consistent routines, get upset when confronting a change and constantly ask what’s going to happen next have poor skills in shifting mindsets.
  
  
• Emotional Control: The ability to modulate emotional responses.
  Example: Children who cry easily, laugh hysterically, are unable to exert emotional control and have temper tantrums.
  
  
• Initiate: The ability to begin a task, generate ideas, or problem-solve.
  Example: Kids who have problems starting homework or chores and need extensive prompts to continue working lack the skill to initiate.
  
  
• Working Memory: The ability to remember things for immediate use: phone numbers, directions.
  Example: Children who lose track of what they’re doing, forget what they’re supposed to get when sent on an errand, can’t remember rules, and struggle with mental manipulation exhibit deficits in working memory.
  
  
• Plan and organize: The ability to manage current or future tasks by setting goals and developing appropriate steps ahead of time.
  Example: Students who have trouble starting large assignments in a timely fashion, don’t have the right materials, and underestimate the time needed to finish the task are struggling with planning and organization.
  
  
• Organization of materials: The ability to organize work, play, and storage spaces.
  Examples: Children who don’t have belongings ready or available for use, have messy closets, and leave a trail of belongings have difficulty organizing materials.
  
  
• Monitor: The ability to check one’s own work.
  Example: Students who rush through work, make mistakes, and fail to check their work display poor ability to monitor their efforts.
  
  From the BRIEF, Behavior Rating Inventory of Executive Functioning (PAR, Inc., 2000)

Difficulties with executive function have been associated with conditions including: ADHD, Tourette’s Syndrome, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, Traumatic Brain Injury, Depression, Learning Disabilities, and Autism Spectrum Disorders. (Bradshaw JL, 2001)

How Do Executive Function Problems Affect Academic and Social Success?
Without the executive function (or CEO of the brain) working properly, students have difficulty managing tasks and behaviors regarding the future planning and organizing. These include: the ability to plan, organize time and space, begin projects, and see them through to completion.

The need for immediate gratification causes these students to resist completing actions now that will benefit them later. Therefore,

although they might comprehend and articulate
sophisticated ideas, students with deficits in
executive function often have poor
follow-through and can’t implement their knowledge.

• They participate wonderfully in class, but turn in their essays or long-term projects late (if at all). This is due to their difficulty planning and organizing time and materials. It is the result of thinking, “If it’s not due tomorrow, then it isn’t homework tonight.”
  
  
• They may do a page of math homework perfectly, yet fail a test if the teacher changes a format. This is due to difficulty with thinking flexibly (shifting) and with generalizing concepts from one format to another.
  
  
• These students might recount a full set of details about a historical battle, including how many lived or died, the food eaten, even the color of the uniforms. However, they are perplexed when you ask them a “big picture” question such as, “What country or time period are you studying?” This indicates a difficulty with shifting attention from the details to the whole picture.

Socially as well, these students have difficulty. Literal thinking (difficulty with shifting) causes them to miss the nuances of the slang and jokes of their peers. Their difficulty planning could cause them to miss play dates without parents’ intervention. Their inflexibility might cause these children to rigidly insist upon certain activities, irritating their friends.

Overall, poor problem-solving might make these children appear to either give up too easily or to adhere to a failing strategy.

Developmentally, younger students may exhibit fewer signs of executive function difficulties because parents and teachers manage more of their academic and social activities. As organization and independent problem-solving become required in middle school, children become more challenged.

How can EF be developed?
Maturity plays an important role in executive function development. Dr. Lorie
Humphrey, a clinical neuropsychologist and research associate at UCLA, reports that
improvement in executive functioning occurs naturally with normal development
during adolescence and early adulthood. Consider the ability of a normal 10-year-old versus a normal 25-year-old to sit through a one-hour lecture or to write a master’s thesis. The 25-year-old has the capacity to do these high-level, attention-requiring tasks because of his more fully-developed frontal lobes.

This development starts in earnest during puberty and into the late 20’s. Additionally, Dr. J. Giedd, a neuroscientist with the National Institute of Mental Health, reports that the cerebellum keeps developing into adolescence. This means adolescents can improve their skills as they mature.

But for some students, maturity alone may not be enough to provide them with the level of Executive Function needed to plan, organize, and manage their studies. For these individuals, Executive Function can be stimulated through specific training in organizational, problem-solving, and reasoning skills and strategies.

Dr. Humphrey says that for many students with ADHD, development will not close the gap. People in this ADHD group show improvement with maturity, but their executive functioning remains less-developed than that of their peers. So even though ADHD patients may perform much better relative to their younger selves, there is still a lag when compared to others of their age. EF can be increased, through the combined treatment of medication (for ADHD students) and behavioral strategies (e.g., teaching organizational skills). The greatest improvement for the person with ADHD comes with combined maturation, medication, and training.