Your working memory, cognitive flexibility, and self-regulation are core components of executive function (EF), an interrelated set of mental skills that lay the foundation for advanced cognitive ...

Principal Ian Knox’s thoughtful opinion essay, “Kindergartners Are Struggling With Self-Regulation. How Principals Can Respond ” (July 8, 2025), centers on steps school leaders can take to respond ...

Kumar is the head of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Illinois at Chicago and past president of the American Association for Geriatric Psychiatry. Pliskin is director of ...

Chances are you’ve recently heard or read about the importance of “executive function”—the set of higher-order mental skills that allow us to plan and organize, make considered decisions, manage our ...

Does moving your body a little before studying make it easier to concentrate?When a child has trouble switching to homework ...

Executive functioning is the new “hot” umbrella term used by teachers, counselors, and parents to describe a range of learning and attentional problems. Recent neuroscientific research on children and ...

Executive function describes a set of cognitive processes and mental skills that help an individual plan, monitor, and successfully execute their goals. The “executive functions,” as they’re known, ...

Reading involves the skill of decoding written words into meaning. The first step, decoding, is the process of teaching children how to connect symbols with sounds. In layman’s terms, this is ...

Neuroscientists and educational psychologists are constantly learning more about how children learn and the various influences beyond IQ that affect cognition. Some research, like Carol Dweck’s on ...

Speaking more than one language may benefit children’s executive function — especially those with autism spectrum disorder, a recent analysis suggests. The study, published in Autism Research, looked ...