Separable but Correlated: The Role of Executive Functions and Effortful Control in the Transition to School Age
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Executive function (EF) and effortful control (EC) are two similarly defined constructs implicated in self-regulation. Recent debates have questioned whether EF and EC may in fact represent a single construct, and they have undergone scrutiny regarding construct independence. Efforts to differentiate them have further queried whether one may in fact precede the other in early childhood. In a cohort-sequential study of 191 typically developing 4-to-7 year olds (97 girls, 59.7% White), confirmatory factor analysis supported the correlated yet separable two-factor structure of EF and EC with partial scalar invariance across preschool and school-age groups. Longitudinal multi-group modeling was then used to identify predictive pathways between EF, EC, and psychopathology. For both developmental groups, EF predicted externalizing behaviors one year later while EC did not directly predict behavioral outcomes. Internalizing behaviors were found to be highly stable and predictable over time and across age; however, externalizing behaviors significantly predicted internalizing behaviors one year later in the school-age group but not the preschool group. These findings have implications for the measurement of EF and EC in early childhood, as well as the development and prediction of internalizing and externalizing behaviors across the transition to school.
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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 | 0.000 | 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".