The 12 Key Skills of Executive Function (and What They Look Like for College Students)

You’ve heard a lot about executive functioning recently. What used to be a term reserved for academics is now popping up in news articles and social media. From grade school students missing assignments  through older adults practicing instruments, executive function finds itself in the spotlight. 

Today we are putting a coaching technique into practice - breaking down a large concept into smaller, manageable pieces - to explain what executive function means and how it can impact you ‘s nd your student’s day-to-day life.

What Does Executive Function Look Like for College Students?

Strong EF skills in a college student might look like this:

• Hear a professor announce a new assignment in class

• Go to library to read it, understand it and make a note to ask the professor for clarification on a few aspects of the assignment

• Add time to focus on the new assignment to your calendar

• Break up the assignment into multiple work periods to avoid deadline stress

• Text a friend in class to ask if they want to meet up later in the week to get started as there is a partner component to the assignment

• Show up for the planned work blocks

• Work together with classmate

• Submit project the night before it is due

• Receive a score of 93 on the assignment

In this example, 4 executive functions are at play: task initiation, planning/prioritization, metacognition and time management.

Struggling with EF skills in a college student might look like this:

• Not being in class to hear that an assignment was posted because you overslept

• Hearing about it secondhand from a friend in class

• Tuck that detail away in working memory where it creates a small but steady stream of anxiety

• The uncertainty related to not knowing what is expected of you creates avoidance; you decide you’ll do it “later’”

• Eventually, you go to the class portal 2 days before it is due, only to realize the assignment requires a fair amount of work and a partner for some portions

• Send a message on the class GroupMe to find the only person left to partner with hasn’t been to class in weeks

• Decide to go for whatever grade you can get

• Miss one of your classes today and two more tomorrow to meet deadline

• Hoping for a C but get a 68

• In one of the classes you missed, a new assignment was given but you didn’t know that because you weren’t there

• The cycle continues.

The 12 Skills of EF

Impulse Control

• Definition: This is the ability to refrain from saying or doing things that are not in your best interest.  Impulsive folks generally realize the consequences later and live with frequent and exhausting regret.

• Example:  This looks like interrupting a conversation or blurting out answers, overspending, overeating, or partaking in  risky behaviors like driving too fast or having unprotected sex.

Working Memory

• Definition: Think of working or short-term memory as a shelf in your mind where you can store a few objects temporarily.  Typically, we think of it holding about seven items.  This shelf allows us to store what we need to solve a problem or perform a particular task.

• Example: Imagine you are taking notes in class.  The professor lectures at a quick pace, and you find you are only getting about every third or fourth word down in your notes.  Your bullet points don’t make sense.  This is also evident if you are reading, and after a full paragraph, you stop because you don’t know what you just read.  

Emotion Control

• Definition: Because of weaker cognitive processes in the prefrontal cortex, folks with ADHD often have over-reactive emotion centers in the brain.  Decisions that should ideally be processed with executive functions never get a shot at those benefits.  Instead, those decisions are run through the more accessible emotion centers, which creates outcomes that are emotionally charged and thus dysregulated.  

• Example: A student gets a poor grade back on the first chemistry test of the semester.  Rather than thinking through the process of improvement: doing test corrections, visiting office hours, or attending an extra learning session, the student falls apart in a puddle of tears and harsh self-recrimination.  Instead of talking to the professor and getting help, she withdraws from the class immediately.

Sustained Attention

• Definition: This is all about managing disruption, distraction, and boredom, and sticking with a task even when the learning isn’t interesting or if it causes discomfort or resistance. 

• Example: A student is studying for a challenging math test and  encounters a tough problem.  They are stuck and don’t know how to solve it.  Instead of seeking an explanation from the textbook or another source, the student suddenly decides it’s time to eat and packs up to go get food, abandoning the problem for another day - or not.  This can also look like traditional distraction, when the sights, sounds, and activity of an environment are simply too stimulating for the ADHD student to avoid noticing. 

Task Initiation

• Definition: Task initiation is all about building a bridge between the “knowing and understanding” parts of the brain to the “performance” part of the brain.  To initiate a task, the student with ADHD often relies on urgency rather than importance to get started.  Urgency excites the brain enough to generate the dopamine it needs to begin.  Unfortunately, most college assignments depend on importance and spaced effort to produce an above average grade, two things the ADHD brain does not respond as well to typically.

• Example: ADHD coaches help students feel the effects of the future NOW by exploring in reverse what it takes to become their desired “future self.”  This exploration becomes granular enough to eventually reveal that what a person does today creates their tomorrows.  Academically, we break assignments down into smaller, doable chunks, and we encourage our clients to reward themselves for all progress.  Focusing on the process rather than the outcome, isolating smaller tasks, and receiving a reward for each effort stimulates the reward centers in the brain in smaller units.  Little by little, larger projects are pieced together over time.

 Planning/Prioritization

• Definition: Think of this as the ability to create a roadmap toward a goal.  Folks with ADHD have big dreams, but the actual details about how to achieve them can be fuzzy. 

• Example:A task like writing a paper for history is thought of as one task: write a history paper.  Of course, there are many steps to writing a good paper, including topic selection, researching, reading, outlining, writing, reviewing, and editing.  This is why many students get mediocre grades even though they often have a high degree of confidence in their finished product - the paper doesn’t reflect a thoughtful process. Prioritization gets involved when students have multiple, overlapping deadlines, and they simply struggle to weigh the benefits of doing one task over another.  This often causes freeze/avoidance as a maladaptive coping strategy.

 Organization

• Definition: Organization is all about creating systems and processes that help manage information and materials. 

• Example: This might look like a student who has seventeen different websites to use in one semester for his five classes.  Instead of bookmarking those websites and grouping them under one tab labeled “SPRING SEMESTER” and keeping them open on his desktop for quick access, each time he needs one, he opens a new browser window and searches for the one he needs, losing a fair amount of time in the process.  Because there are extra steps to check his class portal, he doesn’t check them often and misses announcements and deadline changes.  It could also look like 2,478 emails in an inbox (23 of them are important) because a student gets overwhelmed by the number rather than learning how to batch delete the junk.  A non-technology example is failing to create a “launching pad” in his room where his backpack, charging cords, keys, and wallet are kept so that each day before leaving for class, everything is in one place ready for the day.

Time Management

• Definition: This is the capacity to estimate how much time one has, how to allocate it, and how to gauge effort within deadlines and time limits.  It involves a near constant, fluidly shifting allocation of time, effort, and the availability of resources.

• Example: Most students with ADHD experience what is commonly called “time blindness.”  They may focus only on what’s happening now with little realization of what needs to happen later.  This is an assembly line approach to life, where you just get to do one thing at a time with no regard for preparation, planning, or prioritization.  Poor time management is directly related to the Working Memory EF.  Deficits in working memory make it harder for a person with ADHD to resist distraction or to remember the competing priorities, time limits, and tasks that wrestle for awareness in the present moment.

Goal Persistence

• Definition: The capacity to have a goal, follow through to the completion of the goal, and not be put off by or distracted by competing interests.

• Example: Folks with ADHD often experience lapses in motivation.  Quite often they are great at creating intentions and plans related to their goal attainment, but when motivation wanes or more attractive (distracting) opportunities come around, the plan fails.  A student may have a goal to study at the library every evening between 7:30 and 10:00 PM.  They go once or twice, but as the course content gets more difficult or boring, it becomes easier to stop by the student union and hang out in the game room on the way to the library, postponing study hours indefinitely.  Eventually, the nightly library goal is a distant memory.

Flexibility

• Definition: Think of this one as cognitive flexibility - being able to tolerate multiple approaches to solving a problem or to flexibly adapt to changing circumstances.

• Example: Students with ADHD can have what appear to be very particular demands about how things are done.  This is less stubbornness and more neurotransmitter lapses resulting in having a difficult time visualizing and tracking changing conditions or variables.  Neuroscientists link this directly to limits in visual working memory.  Perhaps a professor makes a note in the assignment feedback field, suggesting that perhaps the student would benefit from visiting office hours.  The student reads the feedback but immediately associates office hours with being weak.  That fixed idea is an example of cognitive inflexibility.

Metacognition

• Definition: The word literally means “to think about your thinking.”  It is a form of self-reflection.  Think of Dr. Phil asking one of his guests, “And how’s that working for you?”  Metacognition allows students to reflect on what they don’t know as well as reflecting on why their preparation didn’t work when reviewing a test that didn’t go so well.  It’s akin to being able to fill in the gaps and respond differently.  

• Example: A student looked over their notes (not an active strategy) multiple times in preparation for a test and felt “pretty confident” about the test after taking it.  Their score was a 59.  A student high in metacognition would ponder, “I wonder what I should have done differently to get a better grade,” and then set about reviewing each incorrect problem and cross referencing that with materials from the notes and textbook to learn exactly why they missed certain questions.  A student low in metacognition may chalk their grade up to having a tough professor who was trying to be tricky.  When asked what they could have done differently to prepare for the test, someone low in metacognition might say they knew the material very well, even though their score indicated a different reality.

Stress Tolerance

• Definition: The ability to thrive in stressful situations and to cope with uncertainty, change, and performance demands. 

• Example: I had a client who had a really bad experience in a computer science course.  All of the work was done in teams, and he found that each time the jobs were broken up for each sprint of the project, he was assigned a relatively insignificant part of the project.  It happened more than once, so (per my advice) he talked to his professor about it.  To this day, I despise the professor’s answer and regret ever telling my client to seek his input.  The professor told him that he had been made “the pizza boy” on his team.  The professor (a PhD in Electrical Engineering), explained that some people think best under pressure and that his teammates must have noticed that he didn’t handle stress well, so they assigned him a role he couldn’t mess up, to keep the team fed.  This is an ugly and extreme example, but it is directly related to the previous executive function of Emotion Control.  When stress levels go up, that requires emotional regulation.  When that doesn’t happen easily, the higher order thinking that should occur in the prefrontal cortex gets rerouted to lower processing centers.  When my client isn’t under pressure, he solves complex problems much more easily.  By introducing competition and evaluation, his stress tolerance got the better of him.

Over the next few months, we’ll be discussing each of these EF skills and sharing small ways you can improve your own EF at school, at work and at home!