LABCS Weekly Newsletter - 11-4-23

What happens when students don’t have good executive functioning skills?

Your friend Theresa stops over. She’s not on your to-do lists or your calendar, but you let her in nonetheless and consequently spend thirty minutes talking to her, which stops you from completing your reading assignment.

Before she leaves, you get an instant message from another friend to stop by on your way home from school tomorrow to pick up a pair of gloves you left there yesterday. You acknowledge back, "OK" while you’re still talking to Theresa.

You ask Theresa to repeat what she said and you forget about the reading assignment that was on your calendar to do in this time frame. And what was it that your mother told you to pick up? Milk? Your clothes from your room? Oh well, she will tell you again so it doesn’t matter.

Theresa leaves and you have long forgotten about the gloves. You decide to play a video game and wait for your Mom to come home to tell you what to do next.

Executive function (in this student’s case, Mom) is what gets us down to business when we'd rather just hang out.

For this student, "Mom" acts as the executive function command center. She commands the actions that provide organization, remembers the details, makes sure that projects start and finish on time, helps to sequentially go from one assignment or play date to the next, and remembers the details.

When this student is left on her own, life may become chaotic, assignments may be slow to start or never start at all, deadlines may be consistently pushed back or never met at all, and important details missed or overlooked. In today’s increasingly chaotic world, executive functions are essential to smoothly function and get tasks done.

Located in the frontal lobes of the brain, executive functions (EF) typically begin to develop in early childhood as the prefrontal cortex develops, then continue through adolescence into young adulthood. Parallel to the gradual development of EF, parents, teachers, and others in a child’s environment gradually escalate their expectations for the child to exercise an increasing measure of self-management, ranging from the simple tasks of dressing and self-care gradually to more complex responsibilities, e.g., managing multiple courses of study in high school or driving a motor vehicle.

Like the student above, sometimes parents intervene so much to help their adolescents stay organized and on task that EF impairments are masked until the teen moves away from home, possibly to attend college or begin a job. Then, when she enters a situation where parental scaffolding is unavailable, she may experience much difficulty.

A collage of cognitive activities, EF encompasses the ability to design actions towards a goal, handle information flexibly, realize the ramifications of behavior, and make reasonable inferences based on limited information. They are detailed functions of logic, strategy, planning, problem-solving, and reasoning. There is no planning for the future without good EF planning skills.

Impairment of any or all of these EF skills may be present in spite of strong intellectual skills and unaffected language capacity. They are characterized by the following skills:

• Difficulty with planning and organization
• Trouble identifying what needs to be done
• Problems determining the sequence of accomplishment
• Difficulty carrying out the steps in an orderly way
• Difficulty beginning tasks
• Problems maintaining attention
• Trouble evaluating how one is doing on a task
• Difficulty taking feedback or suggestions