Boosting children’s 7 Executive Functions

It’s crucial to help young children have good executive functioning because they have been found to predict lifelong achievement, health, wealth, and quality of life.

Executive Functions are skills significant for mental and physical health, success in school and in life, and cognitive, social, and psychological development. They are also called executive control or cognitive control. Some people describe executive control as the CEO of the brain planning and achieving the goal or performing tasks.

There are three core executive functions – inhibition, working memory and cognitive flexibility. Higher-order executive functions are developed from these: reasoning, problem-solving,and planning.

Executive functions can be improved at any stage of life. The models of executive functions such as thought flexibility, self-regulation, planning and problem-solving are important ingredients of success in life. Executive Functions enable us to adapt quickly to changed circumstances, to play with imaginary ideas, to plan and organise our actions, control emotions,to face unforeseen challenges, and stay focused.

Skills imbibed with age…

Working memory and inhibitory control that develops reasoning and problem-solving areamong the earliest executive functions to appear, with initial signs observed in infants, 7 to 12-months old. Then in preschool years, children display a spurt in performance of tasks of inhibition and working memory, usually between the ages of 3 and 5 years. During this time,cognitive flexibility, goal-directed behaviour, and planning begin to develop. In preadolescence, children display significant increases in verbal working memory; goal-directed behaviour (with a potential spurt around 12 years of age), response inhibition and selective attention, and strategic planning and organisational skills. In adolescence, functions such as attention control, with a potential spurt at age 15, along with working memory, continues developing at this stage.

Early learning is beneficial

It’s crucial to help young children have good executive functioning because Executive Functions early in life have been found to predict lifelong achievement, health, wealth, and quality of life.

Here, we discuss seven specific practice models to boost Children’s Executive Functions:

• Thought flexibility: This is also known as a reversal, within dimension switching or shifting. For example, in Task 1 – one might press left for peacock and right for tiger, while in Task 2 that would be reversed, so one would press right for peacock and left for tiger. Children of 2 years of age can perform these tasks. Thought flexibility also involves being flexible enough to adjust to changing demands orpriorities, to admit for being wrong, and to take advantage of sudden, unexpected opportunities.
• Attention control: There is a tendency to continue to focus attention on what had previously been relevant. Consequently, errors seem to occur due to difficulty in deactivating previous learning. Fore example, children of three years old can correctly sort out by either colour or shape, but fail to control previous attention despite knowing the difference between shape and colour. Once a child of three has focused on colour, it is difficult for the child to change the mindset and focus on its shape.
• Self regulation: It is the aspect of inhibitory control that involves control over one’s behaviour and control over one’s emotions in the service of controlling one’s behaviour. Self-control is about resisting temptations and not acting impulsively. Another aspect of self-control is having the discipline to stay on task despite distractions and completing a task despite temptations to give up, to move on to more interesting work, or to have a good time instead.
• Organising skill: This is a skill to set a task that one needs to do by time and manner. One must understand the requirements of a task to get them organised. When teens are disorganised, they can get overwhelmed by school. Multiple classes, deadlines, and projects in middle and high school can be tough to manage. Learning organisation strategies can help teens to be more efficient. It can also be a confidence-booster.
• Working Memory: Working Memory functions by holding information in mind and mentally working with it. The two types of Working Memory (WM) are distinguished by content—verbal WM and nonverbal WM. WM is critical for making sense of anything that unfolds over time, for that always requires holding in mind what happened earlier and relating that to what comes later.
• Planning and problem solving: Problem-solving framework works in different phases such as to (a) represent a problem, (b) plan for a solution by selecting and ordering strategies, (c) maintain the strategies in short-termmemory in order to perform them by certain rules, and then (d) evaluate the results with errordetection and error correction.
• Comparative reasoning power: Comparative reasoning is fundamental to human thought. Comparative, i.e., analogical reasoning plays a vital role in a wide range of problem-solving. Reasoning in adolescence is particularly important because this is the period when adolescents encounter their most complex learning opportunities at school.

It is crucial to help young children have good executive functioning because Executive Functions early in life have been found to predict lifelong achievement, health, wealth, and quality of life.

Organising is a skill to set a task that one needs to do by time and manner. One must understand the requirements of a task to get them organised. When teens are disorganised, they can get overwhelmed by school. Multiple classes, deadlines, and projects in middle and high school can be tough to manage.

Indra Raj Pathak is in the field of education for the last 28 years. He has taught, evaluated, mentored, appraised and headed schools. He has conducted and organised several workshops on varied themes in many states of India. He is specialised in multi-sensory teaching and innovative teaching practices and has presented his paper on “Transformation Pedagogy” in an International Conference organised by IIT- New Delhi in 2012. He is M.A. ( EnglishLitt.) with the degree in Education. Presently, he is Director-Owner of Universal Setu Educational Consultancy Services in Jalandhar.