This INSPIRE award is partially funded by the Developmental and Learning Sciences Program in the Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences in the Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences, and by the Research and Evaluation on Education in Science and Engineering Program in the Division of Research on Learning in Formal and Informal Settings in the Directorate for Education and Human Resources.
This project explores the effects of Executive Function on the child's developing understanding of biology and mathematics. Executive Function refers to a suite of mechanisms that underlie flexible thinking and higher-order cognition. Among these functions are Working Memory, the ability to hold information in memory and actively manipulate it (for example, to listen to a string of words and then say them out loud in backwards order); Inhibition, the ability to suppress a strong and well-learned response in favor of a weaker or novel response (for example, in a game where you must say "moon" when presented with a drawing of the sun, and "sun" when presented with a drawing of the moon); and Set shifting, the ability to switch from one task goal to another (for example, to sort a deck of pictures one way (say, by shape), and then another (say, by color). Recent findings suggest that Executive Function tests strongly predict children's success in school in every year from kindergarten through high school, but researchers still don't know why. Using newly developed methods of manipulating the individual child's available Executive Function resources over brief durations (either increasing or decreasing the available capacity), the investigators will measure the effects of these manipulations on performance in biological and mathematical reasoning. The researchers will examine EF's effect on two independent abilities: first, the ability to express knowledge one already has; and second, the very ability to learn a theory to begin with; that is, the ability to undergo conceptual change.
Research in education, developmental psychology, and neuroscience have all converged on the importance of Executive Function in learning and reasoning. Specifying just how these mechanisms influence conceptual change, how they allow learning to take place, could prove transformative to both cognitive development and math/science education. Moreover, this research could have far-reaching importance to populations with particularly weak EF: children with ADHD (a population included in the present project), poor children, the elderly, patients with Alzheimer's disease, and many others. The relationship between EF and conceptual change appears to be powerful. The goal of this investigation is to begin to discover why.
