Measuring executive functions in context: Self-regulating behavior in the kindergarten classroom
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We examined the utility of two commonly employed measures of executive functions (EFs) to aid early childhood educational researchers in their choice of EF measures and interpretation of results: The Head, Toes, Knees, Shoulders Extended Task (HTKS-E) and the Brief Inventory of Executive Functions – Preschool Version (BRIEF-P). To do so, we examined convergent validity of the two measures, differences in age and gender, and relations to other important classroom variables, such as social and emotional competencies and quality of relationships between kindergarteners and their teachers. We also investigated between-group differences in classroom behaviors and relationships of children who met the clinical cutoff on the BRIEF-P screener of EF dysfunction and those who did not. Both measures of EFs were significantly related to social and emotional competencies and teacher-student relationship quality. We found evidence that EFs are differentiated in kindergarten children and that individual dimensions of EFs are related to different aspects of student classroom behaviors and experiences. Boys were more likely to meet the clinical cutoff on the BRIEF-P; students in this group demonstrated significantly lower scores on the HTKS-E, lower social and emotional competencies, and less closeness with teachers. They also experienced significantly greater aggressive and dysregulated behavior in the classroom and more conflict with teachers. Whereas the HTKS-E was better able to differentiate among children with higher EF proficiency, the BRIEF-P was better able to identify children who may need extra support in the classroom.
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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 | 0.006 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".