Improving Executive Function in Everyday Life

 By Makena Wood, B.Sc. Neuroscience student

While working in community programming with Building Brains Together, I often get questions from members of the public about being able to assess their own executive function. While there are many measures of executive function commonly mentioned in literature, few of these tests are accessible to the public and can be used without clinical knowledge to apply the results. In this blog, I will discuss my personal experience using a self-report for executive function that identifies strengths and weaknesses in executive skills and gives suggestions for interventions to improve in these areas. While this is not a diagnostic tool, and is typically only used by adolescents and adults, insight into personal executive skills that require additional attention remains a useful strategy in prioritizing brain health.

Dawson and Guare’s Executive Skills Questionnaire:

The Executive Skills Questionnaire by Peg Dawson and Richard Guare was designed with the intention to support students struggling with attention deficit in classrooms. As we know, attention is an umbrella skill involved in EF and is required across many different EF skills which are encompassed in Dawson & Guare’s questionnaire. While the questionnaire was designed for students, it can be completed by both adolescents and adults alike to get a feel for their strongest and weakest Executive Skills. The questionnaire evaluates 12 Executive Skills:

-          Response Inhibition: thinking before acting and evaluating the consequences of actions before execution

-          Working Memory: holding information in memory while completing a task

-          Emotional Control: managing emotions to execute a behaviour or goal

-          Task Initiation: beginning projects without procrastination

-          Sustained Attention: maintaining attention despite internal or external distractions

-          Planning/Prioritization: creating a plan of action to complete a goal or task, and making decisions about whether one task is more important than another

-          Organization: creating systems to keep track of information or materials

-          Time Management: estimating how much available time you have to complete a set of tasks and accurately projecting how long each task will take in order to meet deadlines

-          Flexibility: revising plans in the face of obstacles, new information, or mistakes

-          Metacognition: self-monitoring and assessing your personal ability to problem-solve in a given situation

-          Goal-Directed Persistence: identifying and pursuing goals in the face of distractions or competing interests

-          Stress Tolerance: the ability to keep up with the pace of your environment and perform well under and certain amount of pressure

(Definitions from Dawson and Guare (2009))

Even without completing the questionnaire, having a better idea of what Executive Skills are can help you improve elements of your own function.

What I learned

The results of Dawson and Guare’s executive skills questionnaire prompt you to identify your highest and lowest 3 executive skills based on their scores out of 21. My highest 3 skills were not a surprise to me; Emotional Control, Planning/Prioritization, and Goal-Directed Persistence are all skills I’ve gained as a student-athlete who spends 12 hours a day at the university managing training twice daily, classes, schoolwork, and a job. Most of my days are scheduled minute-to-minute, so I wouldn’t be able to accomplish as much as I do if I couldn’t handle when small things bother me, didn’t have a running to-do list, or have the motivation to put hours into both my training and academics. However, I would bet that most people wouldn’t be surprised about their top 3 skills either; the bottom 3 skills in Dawson and Guare’s Executive Skills Questionnaire represent areas of your function that may need improvement, whether you’re aware of it or not. For example, one of my lowest skills was organization, even though I consider myself to be a pretty organized person and one of my top skills was planning and prioritization. Even as a neuroscience student, I hadn’t previously considered that organizing my days into concurrent daily, weekly, monthly, and semesterly calendars would be different than keeping my school bag organized, keeping track of my car keys, or avoiding clutter on my desk. This highlighted an important piece to learning about Executive Skills for me: considering that it is possible to have strengths and weaknesses within a group of skills that are similar, and that I’ve likely neglected my weaker skills because the others are strong. One last important thing that I learned was that my lowest skill (scoring a 9/21) is flexibility. It’s not necessarily important that flexibility is my lowest skill, but having completed the questionnaire allowed me to recognize that I have one skill that is considerably lower than my others and has let me know that this is an area I can work on to improve my Executive Function.

Why should you assess your Executive Skills?

Outside of play, assessing your own Executive Skills is another simple option for making improvements in EF. To do so, Dawson and Guare’s questionnaire is followed by intervention steps and a 3-tiered model for Executive Skill intervention. Additionally, learning about your Executive Function skills contributes to your self-awareness which has been positively correlated to the ability to effect change (Galleno & Liscano, 2013). That is, the more you know about yourself in your environmental context and in relation to your emotions (also known as emotional intelligence), the easier it will be to find the motivation and action to change (Galleno & Liscano, 2013), in this case to improve your EF.

Take Dawson and Guare’s ESQ:

As mentioned, the ESQ is not meant to be a diagnostic tool and provides insights rather than conclusions. Hopefully, upon completion of the ESQ, you feel inspired to further investigate your executive function; however, be sure to consider your results carefully.

dawson-executive-skills-questionnaire.pdf

References

Dawson, P., & Guare, R. (2009). Executive skills: The hidden curriculum. Principal Leadership, 9, 10-14. https://go.exlibris.link/0QGSS33F

Galleno, L., & Liscano, M. (2013). Revitalizing the self: Assessing the relationship between self-awareness and orientation to change. International Journal of Humanities and Social Science, 3, 62-71. www.ijhssnet.com