A Novel Approach to Measure Executive Functions in Students: An Evaluation of Two Child-Friendly Apps

Abstract

Interest in measurement of children's executive functions has shown a major increase over the past two decades. The present study evaluates two new apps (EYT and eFun) for measuring executive functions in children. The results of this study show that children (aged 5-8) enjoy executive function assessment in the form of games on an iPad. However, only one executive function, EYT working memory, showed significant positive correlations with several types of grades (e.g., English and maths) in primary school students. New, self-assessed, child-friendly executive function measurement tools have the potential to provide future possibilities for teachers to integrate information on cognitive ability into student learning plans.

A Game-Based Online Tool to Measure Cognitive Functions in Students

“…The data gives a good indication of the appropriateness of the task design and difficulty level. For example, if the task layout and difficulty levels are not appropriate, the risk of ceiling effects in the data increases [8]. Ceiling effects are a consistent issue in the EF literature, especially when conducting research with children [35,36].…”

“…Therefore, research is shifting away from traditional cognitive testing to a more fun, accessible, and easy approach [4,7]. To make the tasks more enjoyable, assessors have started to add gamified elements to traditional cognitive task designs [8,9]. Improving the task design of traditional cognitive tasks is thought to increase students' engagement with the tasks, thereby raising the probability of measuring children's full cognitive capabilities [7,10].…”

“…Improving the task design of traditional cognitive tasks is thought to increase students' engagement with the tasks, thereby raising the probability of measuring children's full cognitive capabilities [7,10]. However, this is an emerging field that is still lacking valid research (tools) [8,11]. This is partly due to the fact that a large amount of research in the gamification literature focuses on cognitive training instead of assessment [10,12,13].…”

The neural correlates of inhibitory control in 10-month-old infants: a functional near-infrared spectroscopy study

“…The early years of life represent a fundamental period in the development of executive functions (EFs), a set of core cognitive skills that facilitate the control of attention and behaviour in order to meet an adaptive goal. Executive function components such as inhibitory control, working memory and cognitive flexibility develop slowly across infancy and toddlerhood before improving rapidly in early childhood (Berg et al, 2020;Friedman et al, 2011;Garon et al, 2008Garon et al, , 2014Howard et al, 2017;Wiebe et al, 2012; for reviews see, Holmboe, 2019 andHendry et al, 2016). Accompanying these cognitive advances are important structural and functional maturation processes in the prefrontal cortex (PFC), a region of the brain consistently associated with EFs (Diamond, 2002;Fiske & Holmboe, 2019).…”

“…Whilst there have been efforts to adapt or simplify EF tasks for use with toddlers (Bernier et al, 2010;Garon et al, 2014;Mulder et al, 2014) and young children (Berg et al, 2020;Howard & Melhuish, 2017;Zelazo et al, 2013), there still exists a paucity of tasks that specifically assess response inhibition and the associated neural substrates in children under the age of two. Commendable efforts have been made in the EEG literature, whereby researchers have studied broad indices of neural activation (such as alpha power over frontal channels) to investigate inhibition-related brain activation in infancy.…”