Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Gifted Students and the Elite Job Market

That is an excellent point. As also contributes to my ambivalence about social skills training in vitro, executing in real time, in a complex, rapidly-shifting situation, is a significant step up from skills training with an adult or very small group of peers.

As you note, there are also higher-order EF skills that require metacognition, and consequently should be taught later than early childhood for most persons.

This is why the ideal would be for families to teach and coach their children through EF development on an ongoing basis, since constant feedback over distributed practice in relevant contexts is obviously much more effective than sporadic skills training in isolation. But if it isn't accessible in everyday life, then 30 minutes once or twice a week of coaching is far better than not. In any case, I don't think most educators are viewing the skills training in isolation as the be-all end-all, and at this point, most of these interventions are based either on Bandura's social learning theory and related coaching models (peer modeling, feedback, coaching)--if in a group, or on more direct adult coaching (adult exemplar modeling, feedback, coaching)--if individual. So there's almost always "homework" practicing a specific EF skill for a period of time, with self-monitoring and coach feedback on accuracy and progress.

In a school context, the assignments and outcome measures would nearly all be naturalistic ones (e.g., homework completion, attendance, grades, agenda, seat time, behavioral measures), many of them collected on a regular basis by most teachers anyway.

ETA: In certain communities, often on the more affluent side, there is a current boom in for-profit offerings for executive function coaches for students, much like there was a rush of adult executive and life coaches some years back. While many of them are excellent and quite helpful, I would probably view those with a little more caution, precisely because of their distance from the everyday situations affected by their clients' EF skills.

This.

Just another thought to your point Wren - to some degree, it's possible that exposure to these classes *is* the intervention. For HS students aiming for university, they may well have the metacognitive skills (or supports) to identify gaps and work on them again in other coursework. Striving in the ZPD is healthy and motivating.

It would be fascinating to run this program longitudinally to track whether the class itself is a treatment.

That seems to be one of the implications of the pilot project, since even the students who faiiled the class felt it was a valuable experience that inspired them to view college as more attainable.

Joining this thread a bit late, so hopefully this hasn't already been covered.

I have said it before. Getting into Harvard is the hard part. Getting out is as easy as you want to make it. It's pretty easy to graduate from Harvard with far less effort than it took to get in.

If someone is getting a straight B in a Harvard course, that means they aren't doing very well. A grade of B+ is now what used to be the "gentlemen's C". And for the third that didn't get either an A or a B, I will repeat what my nephew said about his Yale experience: "It can sometimes be hard to get an A, but it's much harder to get a C".

From what my children have shared with me about their classmates at Harvard and UChicago, it seems to me that Harvard has a considerably larger talent spread. If we calculated a 95% to 5% talent spread in UChicago, Harvard would have some more at the very top, and considerably more at the very bottom. Some are the David Hoggs of the world, who are not admitted based upon academics but upon potential future impact. And because Harvard wants to keep these people with potential from flunking out, there are a large number of fairly easy courses available.

In a sense, Harvard has a soft quota for the number of PG students that are admitted because it wants its share of future politicians, actors, inventors, business people and other groups that are defined by more than just intelligence, GPA, and test scores.

"should" because what is executive function except discipline from decades past.

I recall you mentioning this before, mithawk, and can understand why it would be in the interests of the institution to do so, especially when there are so many reasonably robust markers of academic success already available to them at the admissions gate.

Interestingly, what I've heard of one of their neighbors across the river is that Berklee College of Music, whose stature in its own field is elite, has relatively generous admissions (about 50% acceptance), but dramatically high freshman attrition (about 60% graduation), possibly because the available precollege markers for success in their programming are much less consistently predictive, and certainly less predictive than how those students actually do in Berklee classes. So the first year is essentially its own post-tuition bill admissions performance exercise (aka, a weedout year).

A complex neurological phenomenon, of multi-factorial aetiology, from which “discipline” is only one of its effects.

There is certainly significant overlap between the kinds of skills that students were expected to learn in an educational environment that traditionally was called more disciplined or structured (both from the environment, and in order to survive in the environment) and the neurocognitive skills that we now call executive functions. As with many other skills that are or were once assumed in a traditional, majority-culture educational institution, there were always some students who walked in stronger in those skills (by nature or by home nurture), some who walked in nearly devoid of them (ditto), and many who were somewhere in-between. In the setting, those pre-equipped with the skills were likely to thrive, of course. Of the others, many absorbed enough along the way to get by, and some always struggled with them in the absence of direct instruction. Not unlike reading and dyslexia. Or social skills and ASD.

A mediocre instructional system, implemented consistently, often is enough to get the majority of the population to a functional level, even if there are holes here and there (like the generation of whole language readers who are poor spellers, but at least have access to text). Similarly, old-school traditional classrooms may or may not have explicitly taught students EF skills, but having a system of any kind probably supported the acquisition of some approximation of EF. It did not, however, necessarily reach those most at-risk, who really required more explicit instruction, just as most kids learn to read even with whole language, but dyslexics do not.