A Typical Challenge for Atypical Learners: Executive Dysfunction

April is recognized nationally as Autism Acceptance Month and April 2nd is recognized by the United Nations as Autism Awareness Day.  In honor of promoting Autism awareness and acceptance, I thought this week we could explore one of the most common cognitive impairments that challenge students with Autism every day at school: Executive Dysfunction.

What is Executive Dysfunction?

Executive dysfunction is defined as a cognitive “impairment in skills that attend to memory, focus, organization and time management.”(Sosnoski, 2022, para. 8). Each of these categories play an extremely important role in being successful in school and work automatically in the background for most students. Take a look at just some of the different areas executive dysfunction can present itself and negatively affect students:

• Planning
• Problem solving
• Attention
• Verbal reasoning
• Inhibition
• Cognitive flexibility (the ability to switch between thinking about two different concepts)
• Initiation of actions
• Identifying a task or problem
• Organizing and prioritizing
• Breaking apart a task into smaller steps
• Staying on task and focusing throughout the steps
• Completing a task
• Self-monitoring
   

For students that have executive dysfunction, everyday tasks at school can quickly turn into a source of frustration and panic due to their brain literally not cooperating with them. I want to take a closer look at specific ways executive dysfunction can present in students and things parents and teachers can do to help them out.

1. Classroom Instructional Time and Classwork

Executive functioning affects a person’s ability to call on working memory which helps students learn and work with new information without losing track of what they are doing. Students with executive dysfunction may find it difficult to pay attention during an instructional lesson or focus on an assigned task long enough to complete it. They may be paying attention one minute, and then the next have a random thought or distraction cross their minds that totally shifts their focus and consumes their thoughts.

As teachers it is important to notice when this happens and respond with gentle redirection to the lesson or task. Remember most of the time your student can be so consumed in whatever they are thinking or distracted by that they don’t even realize that they are not doing what they should be doing. Loudly calling them out in class in a frustrated tone is only going to embarrass them and make them feel frustrated with themselves.

During an instructional lesson, it can be helpful to prearrange a visual or audio cue with the student that you can use if you notice their attention wavering. I know clapping seems cliche, BUT it works! I tell my whole class to always be prepared to give me a “clap back” and, even if it is just two simple claps they have to repeat, it will usually do the trick and get everyone redirected back to the lesson.

Also, lengthy assignments and tasks should be broken down into shorter segments to allow for small windows that provide students’ brains with mini-breaks in concentration reducing the likelihood of them straying off task and forgetting what they should be doing. 

2. Independent Classroom Assignments, Homework, and Household Tasks

Executive functioning affects a person's ability to problem solve, answer open-ended questions and complete open-ended tasks when they are not 100% sure how to do it, such as, do your homework. Students with executive dysfunction may begin to work on their independent classroom assignment or homework and become quickly overwhelmed because they do not know where to start and are not able to break apart the assignment into smaller, simple steps. I love the example YouTuber Amythest Schaber gives in What is Executive Functioning?, where she describes how telling someone with executive dysfunction to simply clean the kitchen will likely result in them “wandering into the kitchen and being overwhelmed by all the steps they are unable to break down on their own,” and becoming “stuck in the executive dysfunction spiral of feeling frustration and even panic because you know what you want to do, but you’re unable to get your brain to cooperate and pull itself together long enough to actually do the thing.”

Teachers and parents can help by being very specific and detailed when assigning independent work and tasks. For example, if the directions on a math worksheet are to Solve each problem or Find each product, these directions are not nearly detailed enough! In math specifically, I have had great results by making an example problem visual on a piece of notebook paper in which I solve the problem by breaking it apart into steps that I write clear directions for. For more tactics that help with math, check out this article on Math Tips & Strategies for Students with IEPs.

3. Organization and Time Management

Executive functioning affects a person’s ability to organize and prioritize. Students with executive dysfunction may have messy desks/backpacks/rooms and frequently lose assignments, forget to complete assignments, or forget to turn them in. Unfortunately having an unorganized environment usually contributes to or magnifies the other symptoms of executive dysfunction.

Providing students with a clear daily schedule or agenda is extremely helpful, BUT you cannot just assume that they will remember to stay on task and follow it or remember to write things down in it. When implementing a schedule or agenda, especially in the beginning, students will need to be consistently guided through the expectations and directions of how to use and follow it daily for a period of time. Eventually it will become embedded in their day, and they will be able to independently follow their schedule or use their agenda with only periodic monitoring.
In addition, having a clean and organized environment is important, but again, it is not going to be enough to simply tell your child or student to clean your room or clean out your desk/backpack. Provide them with a visual or step by step instruction card on exactly how to clean their room or give them a list of exactly what they should have or not have in their desk/backpack. Then, schedule in a time each day or week to devote to making sure these areas are clean and organized.

In closing, I would like to point out that students with all types of learning abilities, and not just those with autism, can struggle with executive dysfunction and benefit from the suggestions discussed.  In fact, I think you will agree that we ALL struggle with it on some level.  I think it's important to be aware that many of us take for granted the way our brains work behind the scenes on a daily basis to complete what we see as simple tasks and to recognize that many people with autism spectrum disorder and learning disabilities brain’s do not work that way.  However, this doesn’t mean that they cannot accomplish something, it just means that we as teachers and parents may need to provide them with guidance and tools to help them be successful.

P.S. If you or someone you know has a student with autism spectrum disorder or a learning disability you should check out our digital math course, Word Problems Unlocked available for grades 3rd - 6th.

This course was designed using the evidence-based mathematical practice of Schema Based Instruction (SBI) which has been proven to “help students with learning disabilities not only acquire word-problem-solving skills but also maintain the taught skills”(Jitendra & DiPipi, 2002).