The malleability of executive function in early childhood: Effects of schooling and targeted training

Abstract

Executive function (EF), its importance for scholastic achievement and the question of whether or not EF is malleable, have become a topic of intense interest. Education or schooling is often seen as effective approaches to enhance EF due to the specific school-related requirements as compared to kindergarten or pre-school. However, no study to date has investigated whether targeted training focusing on those domains might be comparable with regular schooling in improving EF and fluid intelligence (Gf). The aim of the present study was to replicate and extend the previously demonstrated schooling effects on EF by using a school-cutoff design, and to further investigate whether a theoretically motivated intervention targeting specific EF, i.e., working memory (WM) or inhibitory control (IC), could achieve comparable effects with schooling in both, WM and IC, as well as Gf. 91 6-year-old kindergarteners and first-graders with similar chronological age participated the study. We compared the performance of a first-grade schooling group with that of two kindergarten training groups as well as a business-as-usual kindergarten control group. Participants were assessed in WM, IC and Gf at baseline, immediately after the intervention (posttest), as well as 3 months after training completion (follow-up). The results showed that the schooling group indeed outperformed the kindergarten groups at baseline in several cognitive tasks. Furthermore, both the WM and IC training showed pronounced gains in the trained tasks, as well as varying degrees of improvement in non-trained outcome measures. Most importantly, both training groups achieved comparable performance with the schooling group, which was especially apparent in Gf at follow-up. Our findings provide further evidence for the malleability of EF demonstrating that both, long-term and short-term interventions can facilitate the acquisition of those important skills, and as such, our work has important implications for educational practice.

The effects of cognitive training on executive functions and reading in typically-developing children with varied socioeconomic status in Brazil

“…Together, our findings of the effects of targeted cognitive training on EFs are in line with those of Zhang et al (2018), which showed that children had pronounced gains in the trained working memory and inhibitory control tasks. What is more important to us, however, is the fact that such training impacted more effectively children of low-SES, who study in public schools in Overall, our results support studies of children ranging from preschool to middle school, which suggest that low-SES children have a reduced performance on several tasks when compared to middle and high SES children (Noble et al, 2005;Farah et al, 2006).…”

Is Cognitive Training Effective for Improving Executive Functions in Preschoolers? A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

“…For the studies reporting more than one intervention or control condition that met our inclusion criteria, we included more contrasts. If there were two or more eligible cognitive training programs, these were both included as compared with the control group (Thorell et al, 2009;Bergman Nutley et al, 2011;Howard et al, 2017;Romero López, 2018;Zhang et al, 2018). We did the same when there were multiple control conditions like an active and a passive control in the same study (i.e., Thorell et al, 2009;Peng et al, 2017;Pozuelos et al, 2019).…”

Coding in Primary Grades Boosts Children’s Executive Functions

“…Some studies have focused on the general effects of schooling on EFs (Brod et al, 2017;Zhang et al, 2019). Yet, very few studies have examined the association between specific curriculum-based activities at school (e.g., literacy activities) and EFs (Diamond et al, 2007;Burrage et al, 2008;Baker et al, 2015).…”

“…Several studies have been conducted in the last few years to test the contribution of early intervention on the development of EFs (Liu et al, 2015;Traverso et al, 2015;Howard et al, 2018;Zhang et al, 2019). Other studies have explored the efficacy of ad hoc EF training programs (Kronenberger et al, 2011;Espinet et al, 2013;Grunewaldt et al, 2013;Hardy et al, 2016;Aarnoudse-Moens et al, 2018;Boivin et al, 2019;Zhang et al, 2019). For a review of intervention programs, see Diamond and Ling (2019).…”