Executive Functioning Skills and Smart Students

Executive Functioning Skills and Smart Students. While some students may be naturally good at certain aspects of school, they may struggle with the executive functioning skills that are needed to achieve at the same level in high school as they did in lower grades.

This can be attributed to many factors. Some students develop bad habits when they think the work is easy, then consequently struggle when the course work gets harder. This could also be due to an undiagnosed disorder such as ADHD.

But in most cases a student’s difficulty with basic time management and executive functioning skills may have to do with their fast processing skills directly. This means that those students’ brains race from one subject to the next at a rapid pace. This rapid pace leaves basic skills such as time management and self regulation, those needed for proper executive functioning, in the dust and underdeveloped.

For example a smart student with poor self-regulation skills might call out the answer in class rather than wait to be called on by the teacher. A student with underdeveloped task initiation skills might show a great difference between school work and other cognitive processes.

Executive functioning is, at the most basic level, is a broad range of cognitive skills that control behavior. These include attention and behavior control, often known as self-regulation, and working memory. The higher order of these functions, such as good time management and fluid intelligence, requires multiple executive functioning skills working together.

Students are not born with these skills. They develop and change over time and can be learned at any point in life. While, for the most part, students have most of these skills naturally, those students with executive functioning issues have trouble in one or more of the basic functions.

Students with executive functioning problems may exhibit difficulty starting or completing assignments, forgetting information they have read or heard quickly, have a messy or unorganized workspace, or have trouble planning or keeping up with assignments.

There are countless resources to help students develop their skills in executive functioning, but it is important to focus specifically on the skills that the student has trouble with. Students should work with their parents to develop specific strategies to help develop the skill. Students should have help identifying what skills they have trouble with and develop a positive mindset about it. Keep the strategies simple. Having one place to put work that needs to be turned in might be better than a complicated binder with many layers.

Using the student’s own problem solving skills to help them develop the skills they are lacking, will help them develop long lasting skills for the future.

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