EXECUTIVE FUNTIONING

EXECUTIVE FUNCTIONING

Academic success in our 21st century schools is increasingly linked with children’s mastery of a wide range of skills that rely on their use of executive function strategies. The crucial role of executive function processes begins in the preschool years and increases as students progress through middle and high school when they are expected to master complex skills that involve summarizing, note-taking and writing. Success depends on students’ ability to plan, organize and prioritize tasks, materials, and information, separate main ideas from details, think flexibly, memorize content and monitor their progress. It is important to help children to understand how they think and learn, and to teach them to use strategies in five major executive function areas:

Here are nine key terms and phrases doctors and other professionals use to describe executive functioning skills and the way your child thinks and learns.

CognitionThe many different ways your child’s brain automatically makes sense of things. When experts refer to cognition or to cognitive skills, they mean how your child thinks, knows, remembers, judges and problem-solves.
Emotional controlYour child’s ability to connect what she thinks and knows to how she feels and reacts. Poor emotional control might cause your child to overreact or respond inappropriately to things that upset her. For example, if she loses her video game time because she didn’t finish her chores, she may have a tantrum because her siblings still have their game time.
Flexible thinkingYour child’s ability to think of alternate ways of doing things, integrate new ideas into existing thinking, and abandon what isn’t working to try a new approach. If your child has difficulty seeing other viewpoints or gets stuck on ideas even if they’re not the best plans, experts might describe her as a “rigid thinker.”
OrganizationThe ways your child gathers and stores information to use in the future. When experts talk about organization, it’s not just about lining things up or putting them away. They’re also referring to how your child stores and manages information in her brain so she can pull it out of her “mental filing cabinet” when she needs to use it. This article was created for Understood.org. Learn more about this new resource.
Self-monitoringYour child’s ability to keep track of her performance on a task, assess how it measures up to a goal, and catch and correct mistakes. Without self-monitoring skills, your child may set the dinner table without noticing that she’s putting the silverware in the wrong place and then be surprised when the table doesn’t look like it should.
Task initiationYour child’s ability to get started on an activity and come up with ideas or problem-solving strategies on her own. For example, your child may not be able to initiate the task of cleaning her room because she can’t figure out the first thing to do or any of the steps after that.
Working memoryYour child’s ability to hold onto information in order to complete a task or activity. Working memory is a combination of auditory and visual-spatial memory, and relies on attention skills, too. If your child has weak working memory skills, things may “slip her mind” or be “right on the tip of her tongue.”
Visual-spatial working memoryYour child’s ability to use her “mind’s eye” to hold onto visual information long enough to use it. Visual-spatial memory is like a camera in your child’s brain. It can take snapshots to help her do things like search through laundry to find a sock that matches one you’ve shown her. It helps her recall where new things are and where she is in relation to them—for example, finding the bathroom in the middle of the night at a friend’s house without bumping into walls.
Auditory working memoryYour child’s ability to hold onto information she hears long enough to use it. It’s what helps her remember the five words she just read so she can understand how they fit together in a sentence. It’s also what helps her remember a phone number someone just said to her long enough to dial it.

"Executive functioning" is a term used to describe the many different cognitive processes that individuals use to control their behavior and to get ready to respond to different situations.
Whether the task at hand is to read a newspaper article, write an e-mail to a friend, have a telephone conversation with a relative or join in a soccer game at the park, executive functioning is at work behind the scenes, helping to accomplish the desired goal.
In other words, executive functioning:
•    Is conscious, purposeful and thoughtful
•    Involves activating, orchestrating, monitoring, evaluating and adapting different strategies to accomplish different tasks
•    Includes an understanding of how people tap their knowledge and skills and how they stay motivated to accomplish their goals
•    Requires the ability to analyze situations, plan and take action, focus and maintain attention and adjust actions as needed to get the job done

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