Why Doesn’t Executive Function Training Improve Academic Achievement? Rethinking Individual Differences, Relevance, and Engagement from a Contextual Framework

Abstract

Performance on lab assessments of executive functions predicts academic achievement and other positive life outcomes. A primary goal of research on executive functions has been to design interventions that improve outcomes like academic achievement by improving executive functions. These interventions typically involve extensive practice on abstract lab-based tasks and lead to improvements on these practiced tasks. However, interventions rarely improve performance on non-practiced tasks and rarely benefit outcomes like academic achievement. Contemporary frameworks of executive function development suggest that executive functions develop and are engaged within personal, social, historical, and cultural contexts. Abstract lab-based tasks do not well-capture the real-world contexts that require executive functions and should not be expected to provide generalized benefits outside of the lab. We propose a perspective for understanding individual differences in performance on executive function assessments that focuses on contextual influences on executive functions. We extend this contextual approach to training executive function engagement, rather than training executive functions directly. First, interventions should incorporate task content that is contextually relevant to the targeted outcome. Second, interventions should encourage engaging executive functions through reinforcement and contextual relevance, which may better translate to real-world outcomes than training executive functions directly. While such individualized executive functions interventions do not address systemic factors that greatly impact outcomes like academic achievement, given the extensive resources devoted to improving executive functions, we hypothesize that interventions designed to encourage children's engagement of executive functions hold more promise for impacting real-world outcomes than interventions designed to improve executive function capacities.

Early Childhood Executive Function Predicts Concurrent and Later Social and Behavioral Outcomes: A Review and Meta-Analysis

“…Our results suggest this is not likely to be effective. On the other hand, teaching specific knowledge and skills that could support using EF in classroom contexts may be effective (Medrano & Prather, 2023;Niebaum & Munakata, 2022).…”

Fostering Executive-Function Skills and Promoting Far Transfer to Real-World Outcomes: The Importance of Life Skills and Civic Science

“…There is growing recognition that the use of core EF skills always occurs in person-environment contexts that influence how those skills are used (e.g., Diamond & Ling, 2020; Doebel, 2020; Niebaum & Munakata, 2023). At the same time, however, there are relatively domain-general skills, such as perspective taking, that are used across a wide range of contexts (Zelazo & Carlson, 2023).…”

“…Moreover, whereas EF skills are relatively abstract and often measured in decontextualized ways, EF-based life skills are used for self-determined purposes. Compared with component EF skills, EF-based life skills are more obviously relevant to real-world contexts and activities and more likely to elicit engagement during training (e.g., Diamond & Ling, 2020; Doebel, 2020; Niebaum & Munakata, 2023).…”

Measuring the building blocks of everyday cognition: executive functions and relational reasoning

“…The developmental trajectory of children's EF skills suggests these grow and shift over the lifespan (see Anderson, 2002;Zelazo et al, 2004), yet the mechanisms driving changes are not well understood, which has implications for policies and protections for encouraging its growth. The vast majority of explicit EF training programs involve repeated experiences with cognitively demanding training programs such as repeated practice on the dual n-back task (see Jaeggi et al, 2020), and many such studies find gains on the same EF task trained, but inconsistent or sometimes no transfer to new formal EF tasks (Doebel, 2020;Niebaum and Munakata, 2023). This suggests that if the ultimate goal of building EF skills is to support youth's ability to perform tasks such as handling complexity in reasoning, inhibiting misleading pre-potent responses, and switching between taxing Some studies provide evidence that there may be productive gains for EFs as measured in traditional tasks by engaging in everyday activities such as sports or certain types of preschool curricula (Diamond, 2006;Niebaum and Munakata, 2023).…”

“…The vast majority of explicit EF training programs involve repeated experiences with cognitively demanding training programs such as repeated practice on the dual n-back task (see Jaeggi et al, 2020), and many such studies find gains on the same EF task trained, but inconsistent or sometimes no transfer to new formal EF tasks (Doebel, 2020;Niebaum and Munakata, 2023). This suggests that if the ultimate goal of building EF skills is to support youth's ability to perform tasks such as handling complexity in reasoning, inhibiting misleading pre-potent responses, and switching between taxing Some studies provide evidence that there may be productive gains for EFs as measured in traditional tasks by engaging in everyday activities such as sports or certain types of preschool curricula (Diamond, 2006;Niebaum and Munakata, 2023). Importantly, other seemingly mundane everyday practices that are not extra-curricular (and thus tied to available SES resources) but rather are tied to home work have not been investigated but seem to involve the same types of cognitive resource work, such as remembering long lists of groceries while going to and purchasing at the market, planning multi-step sequences while cooking or fixing equipment.…”