Health & Fitness
Help For Parents: Understanding Executive Functioning Skills
Parents, want to read how research is finding answers to why some children lack organizational skills, impulse control, and an inability to plan out?
There is a part of the brain, the frontal lobe, that helps us self-regulate our reactions to external stimuli and manage our time.
Executive Functioning allows us to plan, organize, strategize, pay attention to and remember details, and manage time and space. Students with learning disabilities and ADD often exhibit weaknesses in one or more of these areas.
Understanding the importance of what Executive Functioning does and how it contributes to a child's success in school is important before steps can be taken to develop the needed skills.
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As a 9th grade Resource Specialist, and Academic Coach/Tutor, I see students who struggle with school because they have not adequately developed the ability to self-regulate.
For many students entering the ninth grade the change in environment (larger school with more distractions, different modes of learning, more independent), and less time in school to complete assignments and tasks contribute to problems in school despite having average to above average intelligence.
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Research on Executive Functioning has identified eight areas of development that directly effect a child's success in and out of school.Those eight areas are:
1. Impulse Control/Inhibition — the ability to stop and think before acting.
2. Emotional Control — the ability to manage feelings in different situations.
3. Flexibility/ Shifting — the ability to change strategies or revise plans when conditions merit change.
4. Working Memory — the ability to hold information and use it to complete a task.
5. Self-Monitoring — the ability to monitor and evaluate your own performance during the activity.
6. Planning and Setting Priorities — the ability to create steps to reach a goal.
7. Task Initiation (Getting Started) — the ability to recognize when it’s time to get started on something and then to begin without procrastinating.
8. Organization — the ability to maintain systems to keep track of information or materials. Interested in reading more and to find the characteristics associated with these skills? Read the full article.
