Why Executive Functions

Picture a nine-year-old facing a two-step word problem. She has to hold the numbers in mind while working out what the question is really asking; resist the “obvious” operation suggested by a keyword in the wording; switch strategy when her first attempt fails; and organise the steps from start to finish. None of this is “maths” in the narrow sense. All of it decides whether the maths gets done.

These mental capacities are called executive functions. Harvard’s Center on the Developing Child has likened them to the brain’s “air traffic control system” (Center on the Developing Child, 2011). They may be the most underestimated factor in a child’s education — and, at the same time, one of the best documented.

What executive functions are

Executive functions are a family of higher-order cognitive processes that allow us to control our thinking, emotions and actions in pursuit of a goal — especially when a situation is new, when the automatic response is the wrong one, or when we need to stop and think (Diamond, 2013). They rely mainly on networks in the prefrontal cortex, one of the last brain regions to mature; their development continues into the mid-twenties (Diamond, 2013).

The most widely used theoretical model (Miyake et al., 2000) describes three core functions that are related but distinct:

• Working memory: holding and manipulating information in mind — to do mental arithmetic, follow multi-step instructions, or connect what we are reading now with what we read a page earlier.
• Inhibitory control: holding back impulses, distractions and automatic but mistaken responses — from waiting one’s turn to overriding an intuitive but wrong idea.
• Cognitive flexibility: shifting perspective, strategy or rule — seeing a problem from another angle when the first one leads nowhere.

More complex functions are built on these, such as planning, reasoning and problem solving (Diamond, 2013).

A crucial point: executive functions are not the same as intelligence. They concern less what a child can do and more how the child uses what they can do. Children with similar IQ scores can differ markedly in executive functions — and those differences predict school achievement over and above IQ (Alloway & Alloway, 2010; Blair & Razza, 2007).

What research shows: executive functions and academic achievement

The link between executive functions and academic achievement is one of the most robust findings in developmental and educational psychology. It does not rest on one or two studies, but on converging evidence across ages, countries, school subjects and methods.

In large samples and at every age

In a representative sample of more than 2,000 children and adolescents aged 5 to 17 in the United States, executive functions were related to mathematics and reading achievement in every age group (Best et al., 2011). A recent meta-analysis of primary-school studies confirmed consistent associations between all core executive functions and both reading and mathematics (Spiegel et al., 2021). For working memory specifically, a meta-analysis involving almost 28,000 participants found links with every area of mathematics examined — from calculation and geometry to word-problem solving (Peng et al., 2016).

Over time: from preschool to adolescence

Longitudinal studies are especially revealing. In a sample of more than 1,200 children followed from early childhood into adolescence, executive functions predicted later academic achievement (Ahmed et al., 2019). In the United Kingdom, working memory at school entry was a stronger predictor of attainment six years later than IQ (Alloway & Alloway, 2010). Inhibitory control in preschool predicted early mathematics and literacy independently of general intelligence (Blair & Razza, 2007), and among adolescents, self-discipline — closely tied to inhibitory control — accounted for more than twice as much variance in grades as IQ did (Duckworth & Seligman, 2005).

In national assessments and across cultures

In the UK, working memory was linked to national curriculum assessment results in English and mathematics at age 7, and in mathematics and science at age 14 (Gathercole et al., 2004). Among 11–12-year-olds, working memory and inhibitory control were associated with achievement in English, mathematics and science (St Clair-Thompson & Gathercole, 2006). In 835 children and adolescents aged 9–16 from the UK and Hong Kong, executive functions consistently predicted numeracy across both cultures and both genders (Ellefson et al., 2020). Nor is this only about “technical” skills: in mathematics, executive functions support factual and procedural knowledge as well as conceptual understanding (Cragg et al., 2017).

Even in the sciences

Less well known is that executive functions also matter for learning science. Studies with adolescents and young adults have linked working memory to achievement in chemistry (St Clair-Thompson et al., 2012; Rhodes et al., 2016), biology (Rhodes et al., 2014) and physics (Chen & Whitehead, 2009; Abdullah et al., 2021); inhibitory control and planning to scientific reasoning and conceptual understanding in physics (Kwon & Lawson, 2000; Thibault & Potvin, 2018); and cognitive flexibility to achievement in physics, chemistry and biology (Li et al., 2018). Interestingly, not every function relates to every subject in every study: in biology, for instance, working memory and planning — but not inhibition or flexibility — predicted learning (Rhodes et al., 2014). Different kinds of learning draw on different combinations.

The role of inhibitory control in science deserves special attention. Learning science often means overriding intuitive but mistaken ideas — that heavier objects fall faster, or that the Earth is flat, as it “looks”. Stella Vosniadou’s research showed how systematically children construct such intuitive models (Vosniadou & Brewer, 1992). Even scientifically trained adults are slower and less accurate when judging scientific statements that conflict with intuition: the intuitions are suppressed, not erased (Shtulman & Valcarcel, 2012). Inhibitory control is, in other words, a precondition for conceptual change.

Executive functions are not “one more subject”. They are the infrastructure on which every subject rests.

A note of scientific honesty: much of this evidence is correlational or longitudinal and does not prove a simple causal chain. The relationship is also bidirectional — good learning in turn strengthens executive functions (Clements et al., 2016). But the consistency of the findings across ages, countries, subjects and methods is striking.

Beyond school: executive functions in life

The importance of executive functions does not end when the bell rings. In one of the best-known cohort studies, around 1,000 children in New Zealand were followed from birth to age 32. Self-control in childhood (ages 3–11) predicted physical health, substance dependence, personal finances and criminal offending in adulthood — even after accounting for intelligence and social background. A parallel analysis of British siblings showed that, even within the same family, the child with lower self-control fared worse in early adolescence (Moffitt et al., 2011).

A meta-analysis of longitudinal studies confirmed that self-regulation in childhood predicts later academic, social, emotional, health and economic outcomes (Robson et al., 2020). Executive function difficulties are associated with depression (Snyder, 2013) and other mental-health challenges, while strong executive functions are associated with career success, the quality of relationships and quality of life (Diamond, 2013).

In everyday life, executive functions are what allow us to manage a budget, resist an impulse purchase, keep a promise, drive safely, handle a conflict without saying something we will regret, and adapt when plans change. They are not a “school skill”. They are the infrastructure of autonomy.

A window that opens in childhood

The most hopeful finding is that executive functions are not fixed. They develop dramatically from early childhood through adolescence and respond to experience (Diamond & Lee, 2011; Zelazo et al., 2016). The years from 6 to 16 coincide with some of the most dynamic phases of this development.

Research has also shown what helps. Programmes that embed the exercise of executive functions in everyday classroom activity have improved not only the functions themselves but also reading, vocabulary and mathematics — with larger benefits on some outcomes in the schools that needed them most (Blair & Raver, 2014). By contrast, isolated computerised “brain training” mainly improves performance on the trained tasks and rarely transfers to school achievement (Melby-Lervåg & Hulme, 2013). Executive functions develop best when they are exercised repeatedly, with gradually increasing challenge, within activities that matter to the child and engage them cognitively, emotionally and socially (Diamond & Ling, 2016).

What it looks like in a child’s everyday life

• Ages 6–8: waits their turn in a group game; remembers and carries out a three-step instruction; switches from “counting up” to “counting down” when the rule changes; keeps track of the characters in a story and what each one wants.
• Ages 9–11: solves multi-step problems; checks an answer that “looks right” but isn’t; revises a piece of writing; plans a small two-week project. In science, predicts whether a heavy or a light ball will hit the ground first — and learns to test intuition against experiment.
• Ages 12–14: juggles several subjects and deadlines; resists the pull of the phone; moves between algebraic and graphical representations of a problem; argues, in a debate, for a position they disagree with.
• Ages 15–16: plans long-term revision for demanding exams; manages pressure; evaluates sources critically; chooses between options with long-term consequences.

Exactly how a lesson is designed to exercise these functions systematically — through which methods, strategies and practices — is the subject of a separate article in this series: “How Development Becomes Practice”.

The gap between research and the classroom

Despite decades of research, executive functions are rarely an explicit, systematic goal of schooling. In a survey of teachers in the UK, most recognised the importance of skills such as inhibition and shifting for mathematics — but few knew the term “executive functions”, and what they knew had come from experience rather than from their training (Gilmore & Cragg, 2014). Meanwhile, the market has filled with “brain-training” apps that promise more than the evidence supports.

So the gap is not about whether executive functions matter; that is well established. It is about how to cultivate them in everyday teaching, within academic content itself — which is exactly where research suggests they develop best (Diamond & Ling, 2016; Zelazo et al., 2016).

The CogniPraxis approach

In the CogniPraxis Framework, executive functions form the cognitive core — the first level of learner development: working memory, inhibitory control, cognitive flexibility and planning. We do not “train” them in isolation. We design every lesson so that academic content is the field on which they are exercised — and we observe their development systematically, not to classify children, but to help each one grow.