Infant and Child Development

Inf. Child. Dev. 23: 1–3 (2014)

Published online in Wiley Online Library
(wileyonlinelibrary.com). DOI: 10.1002/icd.1836

Editorial

Executive Functions and Academic

Achievement: Current Research and
Future Directions
Executive functions (EFs) are key components of cognition that allow us to re-
spond flexibly to our environment and engage in deliberate, goal-directed thought
and action. These processes undergo great changes throughout child and adoles-
cent development (see Diamond, 2013, for a review). Studying these changes can
help us to understand how children, who often ‘act without thinking’, develop
into mature, responsible adults, able to plan and control their actions. In April
2012, the ‘Development of Executive Functions Workshop’ was held at Utrecht
University, the Netherlands, and brought together 100 delegates from across
Europe and beyond, to discuss their latest findings and recent advances in this
field. One of the meeting’s key themes was executive function and academic
attainment, and it is from this workshop that the current special issue arose. The
body of literature on the association between executive function and academic
attainment in reading and literacy(e.g., Blair & Razza, 2007; Christopher et al.,
2012), mathematics (e.g., Cragg & Gilmore, in press; Friso-van den Bos, van der
Ven, Kroesbergen, & van Luit, 2013; Raghubar, Barnes, & Hecht, 2010) and science
(e.g., Nayfeld, Fuccillo, & Greenfield, 2013) is rapidly growing. Currently, a critical
mass of studies exists in this field, which allows for synthesis of study findings
across countries and educational settings. As such, we believe a special issue about
executive function and academic attainment is timely.
The current special issue has a broad scope; it includes studies across different
age groups (pre-schoolers through to early adolescents), countries (U.S., the
Netherlands, Scotland and England), disciplines (maths, literacy/vocabulary and
science), statistical methods and significant diversity in children’s socio-economic
backgrounds. In addition, the papers that form this special issue are each charac-
terized by adopting a strong methodological approach. For example, Henry,
Messer and Nash present a solid intervention study to promote working memory
in primary school children, with follow-up assessments at 6 and 12 months. Kegel
and Bus investigate how change in EF is related to change in alphabetic skills
using a fixed effects analysis to control for time stable confounder variables, rather
than statistically controlling for selected confounder variables as is more often the
case. Furthermore, Stevenson, Bergwerff, Heiser and Resing include dynamic mea-
sures of reasoning in conjunction with measures of working memory to optimize
the prediction of academic achievement. Both the Weiland, Barata and Yoshikawa
and the Kolkman, Kroesbergen and Leseman studies use a latent factor approach
to EF and working memory, respectively, thereby minimizing the influence of mea-
surement error in their young samples. Rhodes, Booth, Campbell, Blythe, Wheate
and Delibegovic assess academic attainment in Biology using a teaching session

Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

2 Editorial

designed specifically for the study, so that specific hypotheses about the associa-
tion between EF and academic learning in this subject area could be tested. Finally,
five out of the six studies in the current special issue adopt a longitudinal
approach, demonstrating that early EF skills predict growth in academic attain-
ment over time.
Despite the general consensus across the studies in this special issue that EF is
important for academic achievement, the study by Henry et al. showed that train-
ing working memory through adaptive and motivating 1-on-1 sessions improves
working memory with large effect sizes but does not improve academic achieve-
ment. Thus, near but not far transfer effects of working memory training were
observed in this study; a finding that is similar to that of a recent meta-analysis
in this field (Melby-Lervåg & Hulme, 2013). Henry et al. speculate in their discus-
sion that through training working memory, children’s strategies to deal with
processing complex information might improve, and they may also potentially
improve in dividing attention between storing and processing information at the
same time. However, given the strong relationship between EF and academic
achievement demonstrated in correlational studies, the question arises as to why
this trained improvement in working memory does not generalize to other skills
and impact on academic achievement. The measures of academic achievement
used by Henry et al. comprise mostly factual assessment (i.e., number and spelling
knowledge, word reading). The only far transfer effect that was observed was on
reading comprehension (but note that no pre-test measure of this skill was admin-
istered), which involved reading passages of text and answering questions about
what children had read: i.e., requiring processing of complex information similar
to the working memory tests. Rhodes et al. also showed that working memory
was only important for conceptual understanding rather than factual knowledge
in their sample. Thus, the role of working memory in academic achievement
may be particularly evident in tasks that require complex information processing
and integrating abstract ideas, such as in reading comprehension (Henry et al.),
conceptual learning in science (Rhodes et al.) and the mapping of symbolic
numbers to quantities (Kolkman et al.).
Given the now well-established relation between executive function and
academic achievement, a number of important questions arise as to how to move
the field forward. First, there is a need to move away from merely describing the
associations observed towards studying the mechanisms through which EF
supports academic achievement. For example, does EF support receptive vocabu-
lary learning (Weiland et al.) by generating strong representations of objects and
their name in working memory so that links can be made, and/or by suppressing
interference from competing labels? The role of EF also needs to be studied along-
side domain-specific predictors of academic achievement, as suggested by
Kolkman et al., in order to determine the relative contribution of domain-general
and domain-specific skills, as well as how they interact. This more detailed under-
standing will allow us to build stronger theoretical models, which can then inform
intervention strategies. A challenge lies in bringing knowledge from developmen-
tal research studies, such as those in the current issue, to educational practice
(Weiland et al.). Also, there is a need to investigate how the classroom context
and instructions can be optimized to support EF at different ages and for individ-
ual children (Rhodes et al., Stevenson et al.). A further challenge lies in designing
the most optimal battery of tests that educational psychologists can use to predict
children’s future school performance. Studies in the current issue suggest that such
a battery may consist of a combination of domain-general executive function and

Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Inf. Child. Dev. 23: 1–3 (2014)
DOI: 10.1002/icd
Editorial 3

dynamic reasoning (i.e., feedback needs) measures as well as domain-specific

academic measures (Kolkman et al., Stevenson et al.).
This special issue highlights the contribution that executive functions make
across a wide range of academic skills while showcasing the variety of methods
that can be employed to study this topic. We hope that the papers that form this
special issue inspire researchers to build further upon the solid foundations of
current knowledge in this area and address the outstanding questions and issues
that they raise.

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Hanna Mulder
Lucy Cragg

Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Inf. Child. Dev. 23: 1–3 (2014)
DOI: 10.1002/icd