Al Fin looks at EF vs. IQ — where EF stands for executive function, which has two facets:
- metacognition – problem solving, planning, concept formation, strategy development and implementation, controlling attention, working memory; handled in the dorsolateral prefrontal areas
- motivation – fulfilling biological needs according to some existing conditions; associated with the orbitofrontal and medial frontal areas
Executive function is highly heritable, but special curricula to train EF have been developed:
The EF curriculum has many strands, but here are a few just to give a flavor. Instead of keeping the classroom quiet, kids are actually taught and encouraged to talk to themselves, privately but aloud, as a way of helping them exert mental control. In one exercise, for example, the kids have to match their movements to symbols. When the teacher holds up a circle they clap, with a triangle they hop, and so forth. The kids are taught to talk themselves through the mental exercise: “OK, now clap.” “Twirl now.” This has been shown to flex and enhance the brain’s ability to switch gears, to suppress one piece of information and sub in a new one. It takes discipline; it’s the elementary school equivalent of saying “I really need stop thinking about next week’s vacation and focus on this report.”Here’s another example from the classroom. Children tell stories to one another, but kids being kids, they all want to be the storyteller; none wants to just sit and listen. But the reality is that only one can tell a story at a time, so the designated listeners hold a picture of an ear, a prop to remind them that they are waiting their turn to talk. This helps them learn to control their natural instinct to talk out of turn. Eventually the props and private chatter are not needed, but in the beginning they help cognitively immature children stretch their executive muscles.
Dramatic role playing is a cornerstone of the EF philosophy. The preschoolers, all four and five years old, actually design the play’s action by themselves. For example: “Let’s pretend you’re the mommy and I’m the baby. I’ll get sick, and you’ll need to take me to the doctor.” Then they act it out, solving problems along the way. The idea is that play of this kind promotes the internalization of rules and expectations and demands mental discipline to stay in character — all cognitive challenges. Importantly, these exercises are not tacked on as a separate teaching, but rather are integrated into every activity of the child’s day, from reading to math.
This is a vast oversimplification of a curriculum that has taken years to develop and is grounded in rigorous scientific studies of children’s brain development. One concern of EF proponents is that dramatic play and clapping games will seem frivolous, a distraction from drilling kids in fractions and irregular verbs. But Diamond’s results say otherwise. As she reported at the recent convention of the Association for Psychological Science in Chicago, kids in both traditional and experimental classrooms were given a battery of EF tests following two years of preschool. The tests were very difficult cognitive challenges that require kids to inhibit their automatic responses. The EF-trained children outperformed the traditionally educated kids on every single test. In fact, the differences were so dramatic after one year that some school officials opted out of the experiment to give all the kids the benefit of EF training.
But there’s more. Psychologist Clancy Blair of Pennsylvania State University has shown that preschoolers with sharper executive capability also outperform their more traditional peers in basic skills, especially mathematics, when they hit kindergarten. In other words, as counterintuitive as it seems, early exposure to dramatic play and cognitive games better prepares kids for mastery of traditional academics.
Apparently EF and IQ are two great tastes that taste great together:
In this study 141 healthy children between the ages of three and five years took a battery of psychological tests that measured their IQs and executive functioning. Researchers found that a child whose IQ and executive functioning were both above average was three times more likely to succeed in math than a kid who simply had a high IQ.
Some tests of executive function, like the “backward digit span” test, can be used as training tools for preschool students:
Person A recites a string of numbers, like 3, 6, 10, and person B has to respond with the same string, only in reverse order: 10, 6, 3. This task requires one to restrain his or her automatic inclination to mimic person A (inhibitory control), but also requires keeping the actual numbers in mind (working memory).
Some training tools are more sophisticated:
Inspired by skills training of monkeys, Michael Posner and Mary Rothbart at the University of Oregon have developed a five-day computer-based attention-training program for young children. After the training, six-year-olds show a pattern of activity in the anterior cingulate — a banana-shaped brain region that is ground zero for executive attention — similar to that of adults, along with a slight IQ boost and a marked gain in executive attention.