May 2018: Student Liaison Report
Students with executive function deficits in kindergarten may experience academic difficulties during elementary school, according to a study by researchers at Pennsylvania State University and University of California at Irvine.
In The Hechinger Report, columnist Jill Barshay writes that researchers considered data for over 11,000 students from kindergarten through third grade.
“Sometimes we can have in the early grades a ‘let’s-wait-and-see’ approach, but when you see a kid who might have some early indicators of difficulties, that wait-and-see approach can be a wait-to-fail orientation,” said Dr. Paul Morgan, one of the co-authors of the study and a professor at Pennsylvania State University.
The study by six researchers at Penn State and University of California, Irvine, Executive Function Deficits in Kindergarten Predict Repeated Academic Difficulties Across Elementary School, was presented in April at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Barshay reports.
The U.S. Department of Education collected information on three common aspects of executive function: working memory, cognitive flexibility and inhibitory control.
According to Barshay, working memory is the ability to store and manipulate new information quickly, and cognitive flexibility is the ability to switch tasks. Inhibitory control was not objectively tested, Barshay reports, but relied on teachers’ ratings of how easily each kindergartener was distracted or could resist impulses.
Morgan and his co-authors then looked at whether low kindergarten scores in each of the three aspects of executive function were associated with lower academic performance in reading, math and science in first, second and third grades.
By controlling for students’ skills at the beginning of kindergarten, Barshay writes, the researchers sought to isolate the importance of executive functioning and not conflate it with other academic issues.
Regardless of race, income and early childhood academic abilities, the researchers found that kids who had executive function problems were more likely to struggle academically in subsequent years.
This study saw stronger causal links between executive function and academic performance than other studies had in the past.