What Is Executive Function? – Building Better Programs

Want to Optimize Executive Functions and Academic Outcomes? Simple, Just Nourish the Human Spirit by Adele Diamond

FIS Intern — Wed, 23 Apr 2014 21:15:19 +0000

In this piece, Adele Diamond, an expert in Executive Functions, particularly in children, addresses a variety of questions regarding Executive Function. What are Executive Functions? What is the evidence that EF’s are important? What’s the evidence that EF’s can be improved? What’s the evidence that improving EF’s improves academic outcomes? What is the evidence that EF’s are better if one feels socially supported, happy, relaxed and physically fit? What can schools do to improve EF’s and academic outcomes?

While this article focuses on Executive Function in children as it relates to academic outcomes, it has useful lessons regarding stress and it’s ability to compromise Executive Function.

Want to Optimize Executive Functions and Academic Outcomes? Simple, Just Nourish the Human Spirit by Adele Diamond

From Minnesota Symposia on Child Psychology – Developing Cognitive Control Processes: Mechanisms, Implications, and Interventions (Volume 37), Edited by Philip David Zelazo and Maria D. Sera

Using Brain Science to Design New Pathways out of Poverty, from Crittenton Women’s Union’s Elizabeth Babcock

FIS Intern — Mon, 21 Apr 2014 15:58:25 +0000

Crittenton Women’s Union’s Elizabeth Babcock explores the impact of factors such as social bias, persistent poverty and trauma on brain development and outlines the connection between how cognitive skills affected by persistent stress impact low-income adults’ ability to get ahead.

Included in this discussion are the effects of chronic stress on executive function skills and some recommendations of how to work with clients who may have compromised executive function skills due to the effects of poverty.

Using Brain Science to Design New Pathways out of Poverty, from Crittenton Women’s Union’s Elizabeth Babcock

Executive Functions by Adele Diamond

FIS Intern — Mon, 21 Apr 2014 15:48:02 +0000

In this 2013 article, Diamond, an expert in Executive Function, particularly in children, explains, in-depth, her conception of Executive Function, including inhibitory control, working memory, cognitive flexibility, including the relationships between them, representative psychological tasks used to assess them and their development. She also delves into what she names a “higher order executive function:” relational/logical reasoning or fluid intelligence, as well as other topics related to executive function, including how training and practice can improve executive function.

Executive Functions by Adele Diamond

Key Resources for Executive Function in Children from the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University

FIS Intern — Mon, 21 Apr 2014 15:46:58 +0000

The Center for the Developing Child at Harvard University has several resources on the development of executive function in young children.

WORKING PAPER #11: Building the Brain’s “Air Traffic Control” System: How Early Experiences Shape the Development of Executive Function

This paper explains how a child’s early experiences are critical to the development of executive function (Click paper title above).

IN BRIEF: Executive Function – Skills for Life and Learning

This page provide both a video and short document with a brief overview of Executive Function, developed from Working Paper #11 (cited above) (Link above).

“Rethinking Evidenced-Based Practice and Two-Generation Program to Create the Future of Early Childhood Policy” by Jack Shonkoff and Phil Fisher

Arguing for a “new role for biology” in early childhood policy and practice, Center Director Jack P. Shonkoff and co-author and Center Senior Fellow Philip A. Fisher call for the development of new early childhood intervention strategies based on science-driven innovation (including new developments in Executive Function) rather than quality improvement or system building alone. They suggest that better child outcomes could result from hybridized two-generation approaches instead of simply linking separate child-focused and adult-focused services. The authors also encourage the publication of intervention studies that did not achieve positive results but nonetheless might offer insights that could stimulate fresh thinking.

“The achievement of substantially larger intervention impacts,” they write, “requires a more dynamic environment that invites experimentation, supports responsible risk taking, and learns from failure.”

Washington State Department of Early Learning Executive Function Course

FIS Intern — Mon, 21 Apr 2014 15:43:46 +0000

This online training module was produced by the Washington State Department of Early Learning (DEL) to help early care and education providers better understand and support the development of executive function skills. Created in collaboration with the Center of the Developing Child at Harvard University’s Frontiers of Innovation initiative, DEL’s 6-part professional development module includes video of researchers, teachers, and children to both explain and demonstrate how these critical skills form and what they look like in the early learning classroom.

Washington State DEL Executive Function Course

Executive Function – A series by Philip David Zelazo, Ph.D.

FIS Intern — Mon, 21 Apr 2014 15:42:10 +0000

In this six-part series, Dr. Philip Zelazo explains executive function in a non-technical way, including how it develops in infancy, childhood and adolescence. He also covers disorders of executive function, as well as methods of developing executive function. The focus is on children but in the first part of the series, Dr. Zelazo provides a useful discussion of executive function in a problem-solving framework.

Part 1, highlighted here, focuses on describing the basics of executive function, the brain science related to executive function and how executive function develops from infancy.

Executive Function – Part 1: What is executive function?

Interested in the full series? You can find it here: Dr. Philip Zelazo’s Series on Executive Function