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Dive Brief:
- Math and executive functioning skills strengthen one another and should be taught simultaneously, according to a five-year research effort commissioned by EF+Math, a program of the nonprofit Advanced Education Research and Development Fund, and carried out by the ETS Research Institute.
- Survey data from the research shows 88% of teachers are “very” or “moderately” interested in professional development for improving students’ executive functioning skills to improve their ability to learn challenging math concepts.
- The survey data in the report shows that while teachers agreed executive functioning skills were important in learning math and could be developed using math, many do not have a deep understanding of these skills and could use more professional development.
Dive Insight:
“We’re taking a different approach to executive functioning and math,” said Aubrey Francisco, co-executive director of the EF+Math program. “We’re trying to embed executive functioning skills in math content in a deeply integrated way, rather than go train in executive functioning skills and come back to learn math.”
Among the executive functioning skills that tie closely to math is the cognitive flexibility to switch between problem-solving strategies, Francisco said.
“Teachers can think about the problems they choose, being able to facilitate discussion where you’re comparing different ideas, with the ability to leverage and bring in flexibility,” she said. “You’re selecting problems that require students to use different strategies.”
Another executive functioning skill with relevance to math problem-solving — and certain math games — is collaboration, Francisco said.
“If you’re playing a math game, rather than having the traditional ‘highest score wins,’ you have a target score where you have students work together collaboratively,” she said. “They have to engage in planning a joint strategy, which increases the demand on executive functioning and strengthens those skills.”
A third link is metacognitive prompts that get students thinking about their iterative thought processes in solving a problem, Francisco said. This helps prompt students to think about their plan to solve a math problem, how they approached their work, and how they modified their plan.
Among the resulting misconceptions are that executive functioning amounts simply to organizational skills, and that they’re mainly important for students with high academic needs to learn. But many teachers already incorporate executive functioning without labeling it that way, according to the survey.
