Relations between Executive Function and Academic Achievement from Ages 5 to 17 in a Large, Representative National Sample

Delis‐Kaplan Executive Function System

The goal of this chapter is to present a perspective on student engagement with academic work that emphasizes its role in organizing the daily school experiences of children and youth as well as their cumulative learning, long-term achievement, and eventual academic success. A model grounded in self-determination theory, and organized around student engagement and disaffection with learning activities, seems to offer promise to the study of academic development by specifying the dynamic cycles of context, self, action, and outcomes that are self-stablizing or self-amplifying, and may underlie trajectories of motivation across many school years. The study of ongoing engagement can be enriched by the incorporation of concepts of everyday resilience, focusing on what happens when students make mistakes and encounter difficulties and failures in school. The same personal and interpersonal resources that promote engagement may shape students’ reactions to challenges and obstacles, with academic coping an especially important bridge back to reengagement. Future research can examine how these motivational dynamics contribute to the development of durable academic assets, such as self-regulated learning and proactive coping, and an academic identity that allows students eventually to take ownership for their own learning and success in school.

http://www.pdx.edu/psy/sites/www.pdx.edu.psy/files/Skinner%20%26%20Pitzer_Eng_Handbook_Proofs_2012_0.pdf

Developmental Dynamics of Student Engagement, Coping, and Everyday Resilience

https://www.ibl.liu.se/forskarutbildning/forskarkurser-psykologi/utvecklingspsykologi/filarkiv/1.232503/Bestetal2009Executivefunctionsafterage5.pdf

Executive Functions after Age 5: Changes and Correlates

CLINICAL NEUROSURGERY Edited by Barnes Wordall. Vol. 18. (Pp. 557; illustrated; £8 25.) Churchill Livingstone: Edinburgh. 1971. CLINICAL NEUROSURGERY Edited by G. T. Tindall. Vol. 19. (Pp. 598; illustrated; £12.) Churchill Livingstone: Edinburgh. 1972. The Congress of Neurosurgeons began in 1951 on the initiative of a group of younger neurosurgeons. In the last 20 years its membership has grown from 69 to over 1,000, but it has retained its original intentions and virility by a constitution which ensured that the office bearers and organizers were always young men. Residents in training are encouraged to join, financial concessions make it possible for them to attend meetings, and these are organized as an educational exercise, by inviting established authorities to give lectures on selected topics, chosen to provide a balanced programme. As a result Clinical Neurosurgery is a valuable volume which all neurosurgeons look forward to each year; it is in quite a different class from the usual conference tome, full of brief and unconnected papers of widely varying quality. As the title suggests Clinical Neurosurgery includes excellent clinical reviews but the two recent volumes include also a section of seminars on fundamental research-in volume 18 on coma and sleep, in volume 19 on basic mechanisms of memory. It is also the custom to invite a senior neurosurgical citizen as guest of honour and his two or three papers afford an opportunity for historical and philosophical reflections as well as an experienced perspective on clinical and experimental work. Add to this the refreshing presidential address, from one of the (angry?) young men of neurosurgery and it will be clear that these volumes really do include something of interest for every neurosurgeon, whatever his own interests or prejudices. It is a relief to be able so warmly to recommend these books, when the question posed by so many other books is whether anyone would really want to read them. The most recent volume has a more consistent theme than former ones, and that is 'head injury'. It includes papers on mechanisms as revealed by animal experiment and by a pathologist who visited the scene of the accident before examining the brains of head injury fatalities. There are chapters on engineering and socio-psychological aspects of accident prevention, as well as down to earth clinical accounts of metabolic disorders, testing for acoustic vestibular 36 damage, and aspects of prognosis. This is a significant contribution to the literature on head injury.

https://jnnp.bmj.com/content/jnnp/37/3/361.3.full.pdf

The working brain (an introduction to neuropsychology)

The first findings from a 5-year, overlapping-cohorts longitudinal study of typical language development are reported for (a) the interrelationships among Language by Ear (listening), Mouth (speaking), Eye (reading), and Hand (writing) in Cohort 1 in 1st and 3rd grade and Cohort 2 in 3rd and 5th grade; (b) the interrelationships among three modes of Language by Hand (writing manuscript letters with pen and keyboard and cursive letters with pen) in each cohort in the same grade levels as (a); and (c) the ability of the 1st graders in Cohort 1 and the 3rd graders in Cohort 2 to apply fast mapping in learning to spell pseudowords Results showed that individual differences in Listening Comprehension, Oral Expression, Reading Comprehension, and Written Expression are stable developmentally, but each functional language system is only moderately correlated with the others Likewise, manuscript writing, cursive writing, and keyboarding are only moderately correlated, and each has a different set of unique neuropsychological predictors depending on outcome measure and grade level Results support the use of the following neuropsychological measures in assessing handwriting modes: orthographic coding, rapid automatic naming, finger succession (grapho-motor planning for sequential finger movements), inhibition, inhibition/switching, and phonemes skills (which may facilitate transfer of abstract letter identities across letter formats and modes of production) Both 1st and 3rd graders showed evidence of fast mapping of novel spoken word forms onto written word forms over 3 brief sessions (2 of which involved teaching) embedded in the assessment battery; and this fast mapping explained unique variance in their spelling achievement over and beyond their orthographic and phonological coding abilities and correlated significantly with current and next-year spelling achievement

Early Development of Language by Hand: Composing, Reading, Listening, and Speaking Connections; Three Letter-Writing Modes; and Fast Mapping in Spelling

Results are reported for a study of 2 separate processes of report writing-taking notes while reading source material and composing a report from those notes-and related individual differences in executive functions involved in integrating reading and writing during these writing activities. Third graders (n = 122) and 5th graders (n = 106; overall, 127 girls and 114 boys) completed two reading-writing tasks-read paragraph (mock science text)-write notes and use notes to generate written report, a reading comprehension test, a written expression test, four tests of executive functions (inhibition, verbal fluency, planning, switching attention), and a working memory test. For the read-take notes task, the same combination of variables was best (explained the most variance and each variable added unique variance) for 3rd graders and 5th graders: Wechsler Individual Achievement Test-Second Edition (WIAT-II) Reading Comprehension, Process Assessment of the Learner Test for Reading and Writing (PAL) Copy Task B, WIAT-II Written Expression, and Delis-Kaplan Executive Function System (D-KEFS) Inhibition. For the use notes to write report task, the best combinations of variables depended on grade level: For 3rd graders, WIAT-II Reading Comprehension, WIAT-II Written Expression, D-KEFS Verbal Fluency, and Tower of Hanoi; for 5th graders, WIAT-II Reading Comprehension, D-KEFS Verbal Fluency, WIAT-II Written Expression, and PAL Alphabet Task. These results add to prior research findings that executive functions contribute to the writing development of elementary-grade students and additionally support the hypothesis that executive functions play a role in developing reading-writing connections.

Executive functions in becoming writing readers and reading writers: note taking and report writing in third and fifth graders.

Evidence on multicultural training in school psychology: Recommendations for future directions.

Two instructional experiments used randomized, controlled designs to evaluate the effectiveness of writing instruction for students with carefully diagnosed dyslexia, which is both an oral reading and writing disorder, characterized by impaired word decoding, reading, and spelling. In Study 1 (4th to 6th grade sample and 7th to 9th grade sample), students were randomly assigned to orthographic or morphological spelling treatment but all students were taught strategies for planning, writing, and reviewing/revising narrative and expository texts. Both treatments resulted in improvement on three measures of spelling and one measure of composition. Morphological treatment resulted in better improvement in spelling pseudowords, whereas orthographic treatment resulted in better improvement in rate of reading pseudowords. In Study 2 (4th to 6th grade sample), students were randomly assigned to explicit language treatment (phonological working memory + phonological-orthographic spelling + science report writing training) or nonverbal problem solving treatment (virtual reality-based computer simulation, drawing maps, and building clay models). Both treatments used science content material and resulted in significant improvement in spelling and reading pseudowords (accuracy and rate). The surprising finding was that hands-on, engaging science problem solving led to more improvement in phonological working memory than did specialized phonological instruction. Only when spelling instruction emphasized orthography or morphology (Study 1) did real word spelling improve.

Tier 3 specialized writing instruction for students with dyslexia

In many African American communities, violence and poverty are often part of daily living. As a result, children are at risk for difficulties in all aspect of their lives, particularly their emotional well-being. This study explored the relationship between exposure to chronic community violence and the development of complex post-traumatic stress disorder (C-PTSD), a constellation of symptoms that occur as a result of repeated exposure to traumas, in the context of specific African American cultural beliefs and values that are used as coping mechanisms. It was anticipated that the coping mechanisms would act as stress moderators, or buffers, to the development of symptoms of C-PTSD. Participants in the study included 71 African American children between the ages of 9 and 11 years who lived in a high-crime, high-poverty community in Houston, Texas. The results indicated that formal kinship and spirituality, along with high levels of combined supports, demonstrated buffering effects on exposure to violence.

Janine M. Jones

Papers

Early Development of Language by Hand: Composing, Reading, Listening, and Speaking Connections; Three Letter-Writing Modes; and Fast Mapping in Spelling

Executive functions in becoming writing readers and reading writers: note taking and report writing in third and fifth graders.

Evidence on multicultural training in school psychology: Recommendations for future directions.

Tier 3 specialized writing instruction for students with dyslexia

Exposure to Chronic Community Violence: Resilience in African American Children.