Executive Functioning and Adolescents’ Academic Performance on Standardized Exams
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Executive functions (EFs) help regulate and direct thoughts, behaviors, and emotions. They also play vital roles in many areas of life. However, few studies address the role EFs play in adolescents’ lives, including their academic performance. We investigated the effects of EFs on standardized exams in mathematics, reading, and English language arts. The main findings were that: 1) adolescents’ EFs—especially when measured by their current teachers—predict performance on standardized academic assessments throughout the middle and high school grades; 2) this effect existed among a rather diverse sample of students both with and without diagnosed disabilities; 3) the predictiveness of EFs tended to increase across these grades when measured by the teachers, but not those gauged by the students themselves; and 4) EFs were somewhat more strongly associated with performance on standardized reading and English language arts exams than on math exams. In addition, students who identified as female tended to show stronger EFs; race/ethnicity showed some significance, but not in easily interpreted ways; and age was reliably associated with performance on these standardized exams such that older students tended to do better even though the exam scores were standardized by grade level. The results illustrate the contributions of EFs to standardized assessments for students with and without diagnosed disabilities.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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".