Connecting Executive Function
with Literacy Can Transform
Kids’ Futures:
Six Reasons to Include ExQ’s Executive Function Curriculum in Your Literacy Programs
Connecting Executive Function
Executive Function skills are foundational to developing literacy
An emerging trend shows that educators, parents, and policy makers alike, have begun to center conversations and effort around building stronger literacy skills in all learners. In addition to the basic skills of learning to read and write, we want learners to develop the complex cognitive abilities and self-regulation needed to develop the broader concept of literacy. This skill set required to organize, direct, and manage personal learning goals with self-awareness and strategic thought is called Executive Function, and collectively, these are the foundational skills key to activating learner agency.
ExQ for School: By developing self-awareness and strategic thought through a growth mindset, smart work habits, self-reflection, and self-regulatory social-emotional strategies, ExQ promotes students’ motivation and their sense of personal competence.
Self-confidence in reading is essential for lifelong learning
Building confidence in reading helps students fall in love with reading. A love of reading opens the door to adventures, learning new things, and a whole host of key language skills such as word knowledge, verbal fluency, syntactical structure, and vocabulary building. Spending time with books also creates opportunities to expand Executive Function skills such as seeing things from others’ perspectives, empathically viewing the world, imagining the future and the future self, and coming up with alternatives when things don’t go as anticipated to solve one’s own problems. It is essential to help students struggling with reading and writing to develop self-awareness in understanding their own challenges and developing personalized strategies to achieve their own learning goals.
ExQ for School: Through perspective taking and mental flexibility games, ExQ prepares the foundational Executive Function skills to elevate self-sufficiency and learner-agency in all students so that they can take responsibility for their comprehension, self-monitoring, and goal-attainment.
Learning HOW to learn is vital to learning HOW to read
Literacy is more than reading. A precursor to reading to acquire knowledge is learning to read, by mastering the elemental aspects of sound-symbol association of written words, vocabulary, and context. Reading for meaning is far more complex and requires activating the pre-frontal system and effectively “managing” learning using Executive Function.
Students with advanced literacy skills demonstrate four specific Executive Function competencies. They are self-directed planners. They are flexible and adaptable. These students are good information managers, and they are skilled at understanding others. Students identify, describe, and reflect on their literacy strengths and challenges. They appropriately regulate their learning. Executive Function skills are essential to help students not only learn to read, but begin reading to learn.
ExQ for School: ExQ’s personalized learning explicitly introduces novelty and ambiguity by promoting students Executive Function through highly tailored metacognitive and self-monitoring practices. These are essential ingredients for effectively “managing” learning that facilitates greater literacy outcomes.
Executive Function skills help students
develop written language proficiency
Academic learning relies on core Executive Function skills, oral and written language proficiency, which means understanding what is being read, deciphering the salient information, outlining ideas based on important details, creating internal and external structure based on relevant themes, and connecting the dots to formulate the gestalt or the big-picture.
This nuanced underlying set of skills is called Executive Function, requiring the student to filter thoughts, inhibit distractions, sustain attention, plan what to write, organize ideas, and have the cognitive flexibility to switch gears, adapt to changed perspectives, and meet the demands of the writing task. Strong Executive Function skills help students learn how to:
- Ignore internal and external distractions
- Reactivate engagement during interruptions
- Monitor reading and meaning-making processes with self-awareness
- Strategize to process information, remember to remember, and connect complex information into cohesive thoughts
- Flexibly shift perspectives
- Formulate independent views and opinions
ExQ for School: By introducing everyday problem solving and real-life scenarios, students get TIPS (Targeted Insightful Personalized Strategies) for academic and non-academic use.
Executive Function drives pre-literacy skills
When children are first learning to read and write, important pre-literacy skills are essentially driven by Executive Function which include staying focused, controlling impulses, monitoring errors, and responding flexibly to redirecting effort with corrective feedback. Once children move from the mastery of basic pre-literacy skills, they need to activate increasingly complex and higher-order Executive Function. Students’ emergent Executive Function proficiency allows them to determine the purpose of given information, search, develop, monitor, and adjust inquiry questions and finally evaluate the saliency of resources which collectively influences reading comprehension
ExQ for School: With its fully developed curriculum that cultivates the “Future-Self,” ExQ facilitates a growth mindset, smart work habits, self-regulatory social-emotional strategies, and self-directed advocacy that goes beyond tasks, activities, or subjects to create curious life-long learners.
Focus is Key to Reading Comprehension
Executive Function describes the cognitive processes that regulate self-directed behavior toward a goal like reading. Learning how to learn means learning how to engage with new content, processes, and context with self-control, self-awareness, and strategic thought. Current research shows that teaching Executive Function skills such as focus, organization, planning, problem solving, and flexibility of thought, strategically and intentionally, can lead to proven results.
As we seek to increase literacy, we must first help our students build and practice the Executive Function skills they need like maintaining effort and focus over time, using working memory to apply past knowledge to present information, resisting temptations of other tasks, and overcoming negative emotions, so they can develop the complex reading comprehension skills they need to learn and achieve.
ExQ for School: ExQ helps build students’ focus, capacity to sustain mental effort, self-knowledge, and strategically prepares them for deep work by bridging the gap between “knowing what to do” and “accomplishing what matters.”