Bolstering Executive Function in Middle and High School Students

When adults support development of teens’ executive function skills during the critical years of adolescence, it can have a lifelong impact.  

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Narrator: It's easy to write off teenagers as lazy, forgetful, or disengaged. But when we support them in aligning their thoughts and behaviors with their goals, we help them meet success in school now, and in careers and life later. Adolescence is a critical time for the development of executive function skills.

In middle and high school, when switching classes and managing workloads from several teachers becomes the norm, some students may struggle. Proficiency in these skills can vary greatly from student to student. This is developmentally normal, and factors like ADHD, stress, and boredom can impair executive functioning. But within this struggle lies an excellent opportunity to make a lifelong impact, since we know that executive functioning is a strong indicator of future success.

Increasingly, research is zeroing in on tools that teens and teachers can use to strengthen executive function. A trove of new research suggests that when students are routinely given time to write or speak about the ways they might improve their study habits, ace an upcoming test, or manage their social anxiety, they feel a deeper sense of belonging, attend school more frequently, and improve their academic performance.

Giving students tools like calendars, trackers, and priority lists, won't work if the students aren't motivated to use them. So integrate planning tools into your daily routine, or even ask students to submit them for credit and assign longer projects that require careful planning. When teens provide advice about optimal study habits to their peers, they convince themselves and improve their own grades.

Try breaking students into groups to discuss strategies for an upcoming test or presentation. Or ask them to write emails to their peers about how to manage their complex schedules. Purpose drives learning, but there's far too much emphasis placed on the teacher's role as inspirational leader.

Research from 2014 reveals that when students do the work themselves, identifying real world problem they're passionate about, or imagining themselves in careers that can change the world, they improve their grades, attend and finish college at higher rates, and spend more time on challenging tasks. By helping students build a connection between school tasks and their personal goals, we can support them in developing the habit of using metacognitive strategies to accomplish longer term achievement. 

The teenage years, when students start to juggle priorities and manage workloads from multiple teachers, are critical for the development of executive function—a set of skills that help us organize, prioritize, focus, and exercise self-control in order to be productive and accomplish tasks. These skills have been shown to be strong indicators of success in school and in life. 

Over the years, an extensive body of research has surfaced actionable ways to develop these skills; listed below are links to the studies cited in the video. 

• Harvard’s Center on the Developing Child’s work on how executive function builds skills for life and learning (2012)
• Zelazo, Blair, and Willoughby’s study on executive function’s implications for education (2017)
• Borman, Rozek, Pyne, and Hanselman’s study on the benefits of reappraising academic and social adversity (2019)
• Rozek, Ramirez, Fine, and Beilock’s study on students’ emotional regulation (2019)
• Thomaes, Tjaarda, Brummelman, and Sedikides’s study on how effort self-talk benefits math performance (2019)
• Eskreis-Winkler, Milkman, Gromet, and Duckworth’s study on how giving advice improves academic outcomes for the adviser (2019)
• Hulleman and Harackiewicz’s study on connecting science course materials to students’ lives (2009) 
• Yeager et al.’s study on how purpose for learning fosters academic self-regulation(2014)

To learn more about these strategies and the research behind them, see “8 Ways to Bolster Executive Function in Teens and Tweens.”