Evaluating the rationale and evidence supporting executive functions skills instruction in the classroom: A critical review
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Executive functions are widely considered as an umbrella term for the higher order cognitive processes that contribute to goal‐directed behavior. In addition, executive functions are highly correlated with positive academic outcomes. To promote the development of executive functions among youth within educational settings, some theorists and clinicians have proposed methods of explicitly instructing executive functioning skills, such as planning, organization, time management, and self‐regulation skills. This critical review serves to evaluate the theoretical rationale and the supporting evidence of the six most cited handbooks for improving executive functions skills among elementary and high school students via class‐wide instruction. Research that cited these handbooks and that addressed whole‐class instruction of executive skills was evaluated and critiqued according to the four levels of the Every Students Succeeds Act. The overall evidence supporting each handbook was then critiqued as lacking, emerging, or sufficient. Although the handbooks are informed by theory and clinical experience, the supporting research is limited to mostly Level 3 and 4 evidence, as defined by the ESSA framework, including only a handful of case studies and small sampled quasi‐experimental studies. Overall, the evidence supporting the explicit instruction of executive functioning skills through a class‐wide approach is lacking and more rigorous research is still required. Best practices for instructing executive functioning skills to students and directions for future research are discussed.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.009 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".