The Evidence Base for Improving School Outcomes by Addressing the Whole Child and by Addressing Skills and Attitudes, Not Just Content

Abstract

If we want the best academic outcomes, the most efficient and cost-effective route to achieve that is, counterintuitively, not to narrowly focus on academics, but to also address children's social, emotional, and physical development. Similarly, the best and most efficient route to physical health is through also addressing emotional, social, and cognitive wellness. Emotional wellness, similarly, depends critically on social, cognitive, and physical wellness.

Notes

¹Perhaps it is appropriate to say something about the differences, similarities, and overlap between related concepts used by authors of papers in this special issue: executive functions, self-regulation (e.g., Eisenberg, this issue), effortful control (Eisenberg, this issue; Rueda et al., this issue), executive attention (Rueda et al., this issue), and working memory.

“Executive functions” is a term referring to a set of cognitive functions involved in the top-down control of behavior in the service of a goal (Diamond, 2006; Espy et al., 2004; Hughes, 2005; Miyake et al., 2000; Pennington, 1997; Zelazo & Mueller, 2002). They are needed whenever going “on automatic” would be insufficient or detrimental. They include (a) inhibition at the level of attention and inhibition at the level of action (such as selective attention [inhibiting distraction], staying on task despite temptations not to [discipline], and giving the considered or appropriate response rather than the impulsive one [self-control]) and (b) working memory (holding information in mind and working with it, such as relating what you just did to the response you received, what you learned last year to what you are hearing now, or what you read earlier in a sentence or a novel to what you are reading now; it also includes doing mental arithmetic and holding in mind what you want to say or ask while you continue to listen to a speaker). Historically, executive functions have primarily been assessed directly from the child's behavior, on arbitrary laboratory-based tests, and executive-function researchers have generally focused on emotions as a problem to be controlled through effort (Blair & Diamond, 2008).

“Self-regulation” refers primarily to emotional control and regulation (Eisenberg, this issue; Eisenberg, Spinrad, & Eggum, 2010; Mischel, & Ayduk, 2002; Raver, 2004; Rothbart & Jones, 1998). To some extent, it overlaps with the inhibitory control component of executive functions, in that both self-regulation and executive functions embrace controlling one's emotions, though even here executive-function researchers have focused more on the inhibition of thoughts, perceptions, and actions, and only more recently have included emotional control. Unlike the term “executive functions,” self-regulation also embraces the importance of motivation and alertness—emotional responses to be encouraged. Self-regulation researchers view emotions as equal partners in the learning process and in the achievement of one's goals. Historically, self-regulation has primarily been assessed through adult ratings of children's behavior, observed over the course of time at home or in school, though of course there has also been direct empirical observation using, for example, the tasks of Mischel et al. (1989) and Kochanska et al. (2009).

“Effortful control,” coined by Rothbart (Kieras et al., 2005; Posner & Rothbart, 1998; Rothbart, Ellis, Rueda, & Posner, 2003; Rothbart & Jones, 1998; Rothbart, Sheese, & Posner, 2007), refers to an aspect of temperament, a genetic predisposition, along a continuum—to be predisposed to exercise inhibitory control or self-regulation with ease (e.g., easily able to slow down or lower one's voice) versus finding that harder or less natural.

“Executive attention,” coined by Posner (Posner & DiGirolamo, 1998; see also Fan et al., 2002; Rueda, Posner, & Rothbart, 2005), refers to the top-down regulation of implicit or explicit perception (endogenous attention) as opposed to “alerting” (maintaining a state of high readiness to attend to potential stimuli) and “orienting” (exogenous attention—being pulled by a stimulus to attend to it). One would think that executive attention would correspond to the executive-function subcomponent of inhibitory control at the level of attention (e.g., selective, focused, and sustained attention). Indeed, when assessed by measures such as the “flanker task,” where one is to focus on the center stimulus and ignore the flanking stimuli, it is indeed used in this way (Fan et al., 2002; Rueda et al., 2005). However, much confusion has been engendered by the overly broad use of the term “executive attention,” even by someone as truly brilliant and beloved as Posner. To my mind, attention refers to the regulation of the information we take in—focusing on one thing rather than another and staying focused—allocating mental resources so one concentrates on one stimulus, or set of stimuli, rather than another. Executive attention should not be used to refer to response inhibition (whether to press on the left or right) nor cognitive flexibility (switching from sorting by one dimension to another). Executive attention, to my mind, should not be used to refer to the resolution of any kind of conflict, but only conflict at the level of attention or perception. For example, on a task such as the “Simon Task” (press right for Stimulus A and left for Stimulus B, regardless of whether A or B appear on the right or left), the challenge is not to control one's attention; the challenge is to control where one responds. Such tasks therefore should not be called “executive attention” tasks (e.g., Gerardi-Coulton, 2000; Jones, Rothbart, & Posner, 2003).

Executive-function researchers refer to working memory as a subcomponent of executive functions. There is disagreement among executive-function researchers on whether inhibition is independent and separate from working memory or whether inhibition is a behavioral product of exercising working memory and not a separate cognitive skill (e.g., Diamond, 2006; Miyake et al., 2000 versus Kimberg & Farah, 2000; Morton & Munakata, 2002). Many working-memory researchers, on the other hand, use the term “working memory” far more broadly so that essentially it becomes synonymous with executive functions. For example, Engle and Kane define working memory as the ability to (a) maintain selected information in an active, easily retrievable state while (b) blocking or inhibiting other information from entering that active state (i.e., memory maintenance + inhibition; Conway&Engle, 1994; Kane&Engle, 2000; 2002). Similarly, Hasher and Zacks (1988; Zacks&Hasher, 2006) emphasize inhibitory components of working memory: (a) gating out irrelevant information from the working-memory workspace and (b) deleting no-longer-relevant information from that limited-capacity workspace. A large literature has assessed working-memory development and function using “complex span tasks” (also called “working memory span tasks”; Bailey, Dunlosky, & Kane, 2008; Barrouillet et al., 2009; Chein & Morrison, 2010; Conway et al., 2005; Pardo-Vázquez & Fernández-Rey, 2008; Unsworth et al., 2009). Those tasks require more than just holding information in mind and manipulating it. They require multiple subcomponents of executive functions. I think it would cause less confusion were they called executive-function tasks. When reading a study of working memory, inhibition, attention, or executive function, one should look carefully at the requirements of the measures used, at what did subjects actually had to do.