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Hi, my name is Jason McKenna. Welcome back to the VEX Studio where I'm introducing you to Part Two of our series on the book "Hands On, Minds On" with Dr. Claire Cameron. In part one, we talked about School Readiness and we discussed skills like Executive Function, Motor Skills, and Spatial Skills. Now, we're going to dive more deeply into Executive Function in Part Two.

Again, if you are enjoying this conversation with Dr. Cameron, don't forget that you can go to the Teachers College Press website and use the code word CAMERON to receive 15% off of the book and also free shipping. So enjoy part two of our interview series with Dr. Claire Cameron.

You already talked about executive function a little bit in terms of it being not one thing, but processes that work together. So, let's go ahead and dive into that a little bit. What are some of the components of executive function?

Executive function includes self-control, such as stopping an impulse. But in school and in life, we often need to not just stop, but to do something else that's more adaptive. For example, a child who knows an answer has to remember not to blurt it out, but instead raise their hand to wait to be called on. So that's number one.

The second process to think about is cognitive flexibility, which I'll also talk about as shifting or switching. This is really important during activity transitions, but it's also crucial for learning. For instance, understanding that the letter "a" makes a different sound in different contexts. A number example for cognitive flexibility might be recognizing when one and two are separate numbers, but if you see the number 12, that's a one and two together, representing a different concept.

The third process I'll focus on is working memory, which involves keeping track of information as we work on it. For really young children, their teacher might ask them to go to their cubby, get their backpack, and come back to the circle. They have to process all the steps and remember them as they do it. It might be awkward, and they might not be great at getting their backpack out yet, especially if the backpack is half as big as their body. So, that is working memory.

Working memory fascinated me when I first started reading about it, not long after I began teaching. The idea of cognitive load, like the example of the student going to their cubby, involves too many steps and can overload working memory. One of the connections I made while reading your book was that by focusing on executive function, if students can improve their working memory, it will help with their overall learning. Is that assumption or conclusion I'm making there correct?

I love the idea of supporting working memory. When we look at reviews of interventions to improve working memory, it turns out to be very difficult to improve working memory beyond the task that is trained. However, teachers can think about lightening cognitive load. Cognitive load is the extent to which our cognitive resources, including working memory, are being used for any given task. There are many ways to reduce cognitive load, allowing students to use their working memory for the particular learning activity.

In our field, especially in STEM, we often let students figure it out on their own. Unfortunately, if students become overwhelmed because their working memory is taxed, they may shut down and not know how to get started.

Thank you for joining us for this insightful discussion on executive function with Dr. Claire Cameron. We hope you found it valuable and informative. Don't forget to check out the Teachers College Press website for more resources.

Thank you, and see you next time!

Combating cognitive load is something that we spend a lot of time on, especially when you're given something like a robot, which can be very overwhelming and leave you unsure of where to start. I was really happy to read more about this and how it affects younger students.

Social-emotional learning has become prevalent in recent years. You hear a lot about it in schools, especially now as they have reopened following the pandemic. It's crucial to ensure that students' social-emotional learning is being addressed. In my reading, social-emotional learning is often defined as managing emotions. So, is social-emotional learning part of executive function, or is it a subset? Is there a distinction between the two that educators should be aware of?

I think it is useful to think of executive function and social-emotional learning as different. If you look at the Head Start five-domain framework of school readiness, executive function is classified with approaches to learning, as opposed to social-emotional learning. However, we actually need executive function for all the learning that we do.

Yeah. Yeah. So, the other thing you mentioned that I think is important is this idea of managing emotions. That ties back to the self-control aspect of executive function. For instance, if I have a big feeling like anger, I need to decide what to do with it in an adaptive way. But I would say they are distinct. In every study that I'm aware of, executive function measures are positively correlated with academic achievement. It really depends on the sample as to whether a certain measure of social-emotional learning is correlated with achievement. We know that when students have their emotions managed, have positive relationships, and can make good decisions—all part of social-emotional learning—they do better in school. However, it's not as consistent of a connection as the link between executive function and achievement measures.

No, that makes a lot of sense. Now, in your book, you talk about the role of exercise and movement, going back to what we discussed in the first part of our interview about learning with your eyes and your hands first. Can you talk about the role that exercise and movement play in executive function?

Sure, there are a lot of studies in this area, including with school-age children, and there are three pathways that have evidence behind them. The first pathway is that some movement activities, whether it's a game or a sport, require children to use executive function because of the rules involved. Another thing that happens when we're playing a sport or a game is something called context interference, which is when something unexpected happens. For example, the ball is thrown not to you as you're expecting, but to one of your classmates. Anytime we have to manage something new and navigate in the moment, that's engaging our executive function.

The second pathway is that in some movement activities, the motor movements themselves require executive function to learn and carry out. Think about a dance routine or marching in the school marching band. Once we have that routine memorized, we don't use executive function to the same degree, but when we're learning a routine, it requires that.

Finally, the third pathway is that the brain changes after exercise in ways that may support executive function. In one study with school-aged children, it appears that after vigorous exercise, the capacity to focus attention improves. So, again, there's a lot of studies out there. There's nothing as precise as a recipe, like if you exercise this amount for this period of time—

Yeah, we wish that existed.

Yeah. Right.

Thank you for sharing your insights on this topic. It's been enlightening to learn about the connections between executive function, social-emotional learning, and the role of exercise.

Thank you for having me. It's been a pleasure to discuss these important topics with you.

But there's a lot of promising directions. So you've talked about executive function. I think our listeners and anyone viewing this can really kind of discern the connection, but just to be explicit, what is the connection between executive function and math and literacy, improvements in math and literacy?

Sure, so executive function is needed whenever we learn anything new. The job of young children when they go to school is to learn to read. A lot of us adults have forgotten how difficult that process is. It might be easier for the adults watching to think about what it was like to learn to drive, or trying to learn a new language. Yes, I'm doing that right now with Babbel. So, when we're having to sit and practice deliberately, number one, that's our self-control, because it's difficult. Sometimes it feels tedious and there are many other more fun things we could be doing. Sometimes you get frustrated, exactly. So that's required.

When we think in more detail about what happens when a child is learning to read, they need working memory. They have to remember that the letter C says /k/, the letter A says /uh/, the letter T says /t/, and they have to think of those things and go at cat, cat, because they don't see cat yet and automatically read it as cat. That's the use of executive function for decoding. After children acquire fluency in reading, we don't see executive function predicting their decoding skills as strongly, but we see executive function being important for comprehension. As you're reading longer stories, longer passages, you have to use executive function to remember what happened first and understand why the story may be ending the way it is.

I referred earlier, but I don't know if it's worth saying again, cognitive flexibility, realizing that a letter sounds like this in one word and it sounds like this in another word or it's silent in a word. Yeah, no, that's all really, really fascinating. We'll talk when you were mentioning about the difficulty as adults we take for granted, something like learning how to read. We'll talk about this a little bit later when we get to the motor skills. But in your book, when you talk about just turning the pages in a book and holding a book, if a student has to think about that because their motor skills are poor, how that essentially steals the attention away from the cognitive skills needed to actually do the reading. That was just amazing to me, connecting the motor skills to the reading.

So, we've talked a lot about executive function. How can teachers foster or help their children with executive function? Let me talk about how executive function in math is related real quick. Yes, please. 'Cause we're in a STEM Lab, right? (Jason laughs) That's right. Okay.

So, math is similar to literacy where children have to learn what symbols mean, and they have to also realize that one symbol might mean something different, right? That takes practice to learn those things. In math, you often have to inhibit an incorrect response. You think you've got an answer, but you have to remember to go back and check your work and maybe you actually were wrong. When we learn order of operations, that's a bunch of sequences that have to be remembered. While problem-solving, we're using working memory, and then similar to literacy when math facts and sort of simple calculations are automated, they don't require executive function to the same degree. But math is different than reading. Math gets increasingly complex past where most of us have automated those skills. Word problems take executive function and the more complex math that might have a formula in it that you haven't seen represented in that way before.

No, that's really fascinating.

Thank you for listening and engaging with this discussion. We hope you found it insightful and helpful.

I really like this because I saw it when I was teaching all the time. As students would come across, I taught sixth grade, and you would spend the first half of the year reviewing a lot of the concepts. Then, you would start getting into the pre-algebra, and it was just like you're starting all over with them. Like you said, they would have to be persistent. They would have to really be patient in what they were doing. They would have to kind of work through it. All of those executive function skills really came out when we started doing the pre-algebra for all the reasons that you just mentioned. That's really fascinating.

So how can teachers, we've talked about executive function, its importance, and its connections to both math and literacy. How can teachers help their students with executive function?

Sure, teachers can support EF and foster EF by first reducing cognitive load. One way to do that is to remove distractions. Different children are distracted by different things, but visual distractions, heavy materials out on the desk that don't need to be there could be ways. There are also distractions that are more relational, going back to social-emotional learning. There's one large study that's one of my favorites, which is preschool children in classrooms where teachers were emotionally consistent learned more, even compared to children in classrooms where maybe teachers had some emotional highs, but if they were inconsistent, that detracted from children's learning.

And I'm speaking causally here, but the theoretical explanation behind this is that when teachers are emotionally consistent, or maybe there's something going on with peers or with family that's having the child worry about those relationships, it takes their working memory. They're worrying about it. They're not able to focus on the learning. So attending to that sort of dynamic in classrooms can help reduce cognitive load.

Supporting self-control, especially with engaging hands-on materials like in the VEXcode, in the VEX 123 kits, that's going to be very demanding of children's self-control. Teachers will want to think about how to structure time with really attractive materials, to not ask too much, right? So maybe you have the materials at the front of the classroom until it's time for children to be able to engage with them. Again, some children can wait many minutes for something interesting to start, and every teacher knows some children can hardly wait at all.

The third thing I'll talk about is supporting switching. There might be an activity transition from literacy to math, which might include a materials transition. Some students don't realize that they should put their math notebook away when it's time to do art, and they leave it on their desk, and then it becomes distracting. The final one is space transition, moving within the classroom or outside the classroom. The best way to facilitate those transitions is to practice them.

Yeah, yeah. Right? Yeah. You spend that time early in the school year, but it's worth it because the skills get automated, and the class can transition quickly. That's great. Every really good kindergarten through third-grade teacher I knew in my career had the best routines. They had routines for everything. They had routines for lining up at the door. They had routines for the beginning of the day. They had routines for the end of the day. They had routines for everything, and it was just like what you just mentioned right there. You wanted the students to focus on what you wanted to focus on and not something like how do I line up, or where do I go? And all those other things, so that's really fascinating.

Where do I put my feet? Yeah, exactly. What do I do with my book? What do I do with this book? Yeah, all of those, correct. Yep.

If you have any questions or comments about anything that was discussed in this segment, please go to the Professional Learning Community and VEX Professional Development Plus. Myself, other members of the team, and other educators would love to engage you in a dialogue about these important concepts.

The things we discussed in this book are so important. If you want to explore further, or if you just want to explore the book, please put those comments in our professional learning community. We would be happy to engage with you in that dialogue about the book and about this segment.

Thank you very much.

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