Isegoria

Executive function refers to the ability to think straight, Paul Tough explains — to order your thoughts, to process information in a coherent way, to hold relevant details in your short-term memory, to avoid distractions and mental traps and focus on the task in front of you — and such self-regulation may be even more important than IQ for academic success. Can it be improved though?

In laboratory studies, research psychologists have found that with executive function, practice helps; when children or adults repeatedly perform basic exercises in cognitive self-regulation, they get better at it. But when researchers try to take those experiments out of the lab and into the classroom, their success rate is much lower. Angela Duckworth, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, has spent the last seven years trying to find reliable, repeatable methods to improve self-control in children. When I spoke to her recently, she told me about a six-week-long experiment that she and some colleagues conducted in 2003 with 40 fifth-grade students at a school in Philadelphia.

“We did everything right,” she told me: led the kids through self-control exercises, helped them reorganize their lockers, gave them rewards for completing their homework. And at the end of the experiment, the students dutifully reported that they now had more self-control than when they started the program. But in fact, they did not: the children who had been through the intervention did no better on a variety of measures than a control group at the same school. “We looked at teacher ratings of self-control, we looked at homework completion, we looked at standardized achievement tests, we looked at G.P.A., we looked at whether they were late to class more,” Duckworth explained. “We got zero effect on everything.”

The Tools of the Mind program takes a different tack, asserting that the right kinds of play teach self-control:

The necessary ingredient is what Leong and Bodrova call “mature dramatic play”: complex, extended make-believe scenarios, involving multiple children and lasting for hours, even days. If you want to succeed in school and in life, they say, you first need to do what Abigail and Jocelyn and Henry have done every school day for the past two years: spend hour after hour dressing up in firefighter hats and wedding gowns, cooking make-believe hamburgers and pouring nonexistent tea, doing the hard, serious work of playing pretend.

Tools of the Mind does not fall into the pre-academic camp of pre-school teaching, but it doesn’t fall into the “kids should just do their own thing” camp either:

For Vygotsky, the real purpose of early-childhood education was not to learn content, like the letters of the alphabet or the names of shapes and colors and animals. The point was to learn how to think. When children enter preschool, Vygotsky wrote, they are “slaves to their environment,” unable to control their reactions or direct their interests, responding to whatever shiny objects are put in front of them. Accordingly, the most important goal of prekindergarten is to teach children how to master their thoughts. And the best way for children to do that, Vygotsky believed, especially at this early age, is to employ various tools, tricks and habits that train the mind to work at a higher level. So Tools of the Mind students learn to use “private speech” — to talk to themselves as they do a difficult task (like, say, forming the letter W), to help themselves remember what step comes next (down, up, down, up). They use “mediators”: physical objects that remind them how to do a particular task, like CD-size cards, one with a pair of lips and one with an ear, that signify whose turn it is to read aloud in Buddy Reading and whose turn it is to listen. But more than anything, they use play.

Play is, ironically, constraining:

In the United States, we often associate play with freedom, but to Vygotsky, dramatic play was actually the arena where children’s actions were most tightly restricted. When a young boy is acting out the role of a daddy making breakfast, he is limited by all the rules of daddy-ness. Some of those limitations come from his playmates: if he starts acting like a baby (or a policeman or a dinosaur) in the middle of making breakfast, the other children will be sure to steer him back to the eggs and bacon. But even beyond that explicit peer pressure, Vygotsky would say, the child is guided by the basic principles of play. Make-believe isn’t as stimulating and satisfying — it simply isn’t as much fun — if you don’t stick to your role. And when children follow the rules of make-believe and push one another to follow those rules, he said, they develop important habits of self-control.

Bodrova and Leong drew on research conducted by some of Vygotsky’s followers that showed that children acting out a dramatic scene can control their impulses much better than they can in nonplay situations. In one experiment, 4-year-old children were first asked to stand still for as long as they could. They typically did not make it past a minute. But when the kids played a make-believe game in which they were guards at a factory, they were able to stand at attention for more than four minutes. In another experiment, prekindergarten-age children were asked to memorize a list of unrelated words. Then they played “grocery store” and were asked to memorize a similar list of words — this time, though, as a shopping list. In the play situation, on average, the children were able to remember twice as many words. Bodrova and Leong say they see the same effect in Tools of the Mind classrooms: when their students spend more time on dramatic play, not only does their level of self-control improve, but so do their language skills.

In the past, when psychologists (or parents or teachers or priests) tried to improve children’s self-control, they used the principles of behaviorism, reinforcing good and bad behaviors with rewards and punishments. The message to kids was that terrible things would happen if they didn’t control their impulses, and the role of adults, whether parents or preschool teachers, was to train children by praising them for their positive self-control (“Look at how well Cindy is sitting!”) and criticizing them for their lapses. And in most American prekindergartens and kindergartens, behaviorism, in some form, is still the dominant method. But Bodrova and Leong say that those “external reinforcement systems” create “other-directed regulation” — good behavior done not from some internal sense of control but for the approval of others, to avoid punishment and win praise and treats. And that, they say, is a kind of regulation that is not particularly valuable or lasting.