The crucial role of executive functions in our learners

 

Reflections from the course: Executive Functions for children with SEN (DAS Academy & Social Service Institute)

 

Meet Sara, a secondary school student. She often struggles with managing her time, organising her tasks, and staying focused on her school work. As a result, she frequently forgets assignments, loses track of deadlines, and has difficulties prioritising tasks. She also has a hard time following multi-step instructions, and tends to get easily distracted by her phone or other stimuli in the classroom. 

 

Next, meet Alex, a primary 5 student who is often disruptive in class. He often has emotional outbursts in response to minor frustrations or perceived slights, and tends to act without thinking, which has led to several incidents of impulsivity and poor decision-making. He often yells and curses at other students and even teachers and as a result, many students do not want to be friends with him as well. Furthermore, he is unmotivated in learning, and teachers have a hard time getting him to start on and complete his tasks. 

 

Sounds familiar? As educators, we meet many students everyday, each exhibiting different sets of characteristics and behaviours. Often, when students are not compliant or have difficulty exhibiting the desired behaviours despite our repeated reminders, it can be extremely frustrating. While it is easy for us to ascribe these behaviours as deviant and problematic, there may be underlying reasons, more specifically with these behaviours possibly arising from deficits in students’ executive functions. 

 

Executive functions are a set of cognitive processes, encompassing the core building blocks of working memory, response inhibition and cognitive flexibility. Other important executive functions include organisation, metacognition, planning, emotional control, sustained attention, time management and task initiation. Working together with an interplay of other internal and external factors, they help us to cope with, and thrive in our daily life. As we grow older, these functions help determine our efficacy in tackling every minute activity in our life, and have long term contributions towards our self-esteem and confidence. For students, these functions predict academic and social competence and achievement. As for students with Special Educational Needs (SEN), these students have a higher possibility of experiencing these deficits and thus need more holistic support to help them be more ready for learning, and to experience a  greater quality of life.

 

 

Examples of how executive function deficits may present themselves externally in different contexts of a student’s life: 

Executive Function Deficits

Academic 

Non-academic/ Socio-emotional

Working Memory

Difficulty remembering information and important formulas

Difficulty remembering information such as friend’s birthdays, important dates

Organisation

Difficulty keeping documents and homework in an organised fashion, doing tasks and following steps systematically

Cluttered personal spaces, loss of belongings 

Response Inhibition

Losing attention when there are distractions in the classroom

Difficulty in delayed gratification, more likely to make impulsive decisions without considering consequences 

Metacognition

Persistent careless mistakes in one’s assignments, difficulties in making changes to one’s learning behaviour

Difficulty in evaluating ideas shared by peers

Flexibility

Difficulty in applying taught concepts to differently worded questions

Difficulty in perspective-taking and accepting others’ opinions, unable to understand sarcasm

Planning

Challenges in solving multi-step questions and planning for essays

Difficulty in establishing plans with others and following through with commitments

Emotional Control

Emotional outbursts and intense negative feelings when dealing with challenging questions and tasks

Prone to emotional outbursts and having disproportionate reactions to triggers 

Sustained attention

Decreased task stamina and lack of continuous effort in assignments and tasks

Difficulty in obtaining appropriate social information in conversations

Time management

Difficulty adhering to deadlines and time limits,  procrastination and in prioritising important assignments

Problems with punctuality, difficulty in prioritising events 

Task initiation

Task aversion, difficulty in starting on assigned work

Task procrastination, slow to get started on required tasks 

 

Through the course ‘Executive Function Skills for Children with SEN’ organised by DAS Academy in partnership with Social Service Institute (SSI), I had the opportunity to view my students from a different lens. By drawing connections between targeted behaviours to possible executive deficits, there was increased clarity in drawing up action plans and goals for them. Along with other like-minded educators and parents, we attempted to draw up intervention plans, guided by a few key principles. Most notably, the principle of working on external environments to help students to change internally showed me that we as educators can use our own creativity to modify our classrooms and ways that we carry out our instructions to help facilitate change in our students. Additionally, while using incentives was highly emphasised to help students with delayed gratification skills, we also had to be mindful about providing adequate but not excessive support for our students. 

 

All in all, supporting learners’ executive functions is extremely important as they are amenable with the right intervention. Often, the competitive Singaporean education system emphasises on learning and academic competition, but learners (especially those with SEN) cannot learn effectively without adequate foundational executive function skills. While parents may not see the immediate importance and effect of executive functions, we can definitely do more as educators. This can be done by taking the first step to understand our students better by connecting undesired behaviours of our learners to executive function deficits, and ultimately adapting our teaching and ways we approach learners in our classroom to better support these deficits.

 

 

Written by:
Lim Jia Hui – DAS Educational Therapist

 

Published on 19 April 2023