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.
Last edited by aeh; 04/10/21 07:38 AM.
