How Does Executive Functioning Affect Learning?
Without
the Executive Functioning (or CEO of the brain) working properly, students have
difficulty managing tasks and behaviors, including: planing, organizing time
and space, beginning projects, and completing them.
The need for immediate gratification
causes these students to resist completing actions now that will benefit them
later. Therefore, although they might
comprehend and articulate sophisticated ideas, students with deficits
in EF often have poor follow-through and can’t implement their knowledge.
Often, these are the students who appear to be “underachieving academically:”
They participate
wonderfully in class, but turn in their essays or long-term projects late (if
at all). Their low achievement is due to their difficulty planning and
organizing time and materials. It is the result of thinking, “If it’s not due
tomorrow, then it isn’t homework tonight.”
They may do a page of math
homework perfectly, yet fail a test if the teacher changes the format.
This problem stems from difficulty with thinking flexibly (shifting)
and with generalizing concepts from one format to another.
These students might
recount a full set of details about a historical battle, including how many
lived or died, the food eaten, even the color of the uniforms. However, they
are perplexed when you ask them a “big picture” question such as, “What country
or time period are you studying?” This indicates a difficulty with shifting
attention from the details to the whole picture.