ο»ΏAFTER THE INTRO:
Welcome to my executive Functions in School series. I am uncovering the ways in which weak executive function skills create learning challenges. And throughout this four part series, I'll provide a detailed look at executive functioning in science, math, English, and social studies. And I'll address the difficulties that our young people face when they have lagging executive function skills.
And I'm also going to share some recommendations that you can take to your teens teachers. Now, if you're not familiar with executive functions, you might want to listen to episode 102, where I provide an overview of executive function skills and how they impact learning. I created three buckets of skills to make it easier.
Bucket number one is planning, organization, and time management. Bucket number two is impulse control and self regulation. And bucket number three is cognitive flexibility. So if you're not familiar with executive functioning, you might want to listen to episode 102. In this particular episode, we're going to go deep into how executive function challenges make learning math more difficult.
We're going to meet Emily. She's an 8th grade student who struggles in math. Let's start with bucket number one planning, organization, and time management challenges. Well, as it relates to math, emily's organization issues are making it really difficult for her to keep up with her assignments and her homework.
Disorganization extends not just to the material things, but also the way she sets up and solves problems on paper. And this disorganization leads to a lot of careless, mistakes, and sometimes confusion. Emily's time management challenges mean that she's not great at estimating how long assignments are going to take, and also because she often gets the answers wrong.
It takes more time for her to complete the work because she needs time to make those corrections.
Bucket number two impulse control and self regulation. Emily understands math concepts when they're taught in class, but as soon as she gets home, she struggles with the homework assignments. And sometimes when she does get started, she has a really hard time persisting through completion. There's something that I look at which is impulsivity and problem solving.
So what I mean by that is Emily rushes through problems without carefully reading the instructions or checking her work. And of course, this leads to lots of errors. And because she's so easily frustrated and also disorganized, she's rushing through the work because it feels so uncomfortable for her. And she's often.
Very, very frustrated. Bucket number three cognitive flexibility. And I'm going to add working memory to this bucket. So this is a really big deal, and we see this a lot in the young people we work with. Limited working memory makes it really difficult to retain math facts. And so Emily has yet to fully memorize basic math facts, which means she's spending a lot of mental energy on calculating things like subtraction, multiplication, and division.
Not only does this slow her down, but it makes her math experience really, really challenging. Emily has difficulty with sequencing and with multi step problems, which, as we know, multi step problems become fairly common the higher you go in math. Emily understands individual concepts, but she struggles to remember and follow the sequence of steps needed to solve complex problems, and she forgets which calculation is appropriate for which problem.
Word problems are really troubling for her because she has to keep up with so many things in her working memory in order to solve the problem. So teaching Emily how to diagram problems and having her work on her own list of procedures will help her. So what do we want to ask of our teachers?
Well, here are my recommendations. And this first one is really for you and the teacher to work on together. And that is we have to invest in math practice. Emily would have a much less stressful time if her math facts were solid. So ask her teacher for programs and practice sequences to reach automaticity in addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division.
And we want Emily to have visual tools so that she can easily differentiate between fractions, decimals, and percentages. We see a lot of young people get tripped up there. I'd like her teachers to give her organizational tools. Encourage Emily to use graph paper. That way her numbers can stay aligned, or she can turn line paper sideways so that she can work in columns.
And it would be really great if we could just keep all of her math documents, worksheets, et cetera, together in a math folder or a math binder. We're going to have to slow Emily down and encourage self monitoring. So if her teacher could do this with the entire class, that would be great.
Her teacher could teach the entire class how to pause and check their work, how to talk aloud and reflect on each step to make sure she's following the correct process or sequence. We want Emily to, to learn a routine, to check her work. And then we want the teacher and.
It'd be great if we did this at home to acknowledge her when she uses it. One thing that could also help is to have someone at home check her work, but do it in a way that is not overwhelming. So it might be good, for example, for someone to look at Emily's work and say, I see three mistakes in row whatever.
Or I see two mistakes, and one of them has to do with the positive negative sign and one of them has to do with blank. Why don't you look in those areas and see if you can figure that out? When we are constantly circling the wrong answer, it increases a young person's anxiety.
So in this podcast, I covered a number of challenges and I have created a free guide Executive Functions and Math and use it with your young person to identify area is where they feel like they could use some more support. And feel free to take the guide to the next meeting you have with your young person's teacher or school counselor or even the special education team.
I will put the link to the free guide in the show notes.
