School has often been cited as the place to learn “reading, writing, and arithmetic,” but many believe that school attendance teaches a whole lot more. So, what are some other benefits of school that are not often measured? How does the experience of schooling shape students’ lives beyond academics? What can we do to enhance the learning of other important skills inside of school, in our homes, and beyond?
In December 2025, this article entitled
Formal Schooling Boosts Executive Functions Beyond Natural Maturation, appeared in Psypost, a publication which examines the latest discoveries in psychology and neuroscience. Katrina Petrova, the author, asserts that besides teaching traditional subject matter, going to school also appears to upgrade the fundamental operating system of students’ brains, and she cites findings in the
Journal of Experimental Child Psychology.
The authors of the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology study, Jamie Donenfeld, Mahita Mudundi, Erik Blaser, and Zsuzsa Kaldy of the University of Massachusetts Boston, revealed that “school has a modest, but robust effect on executive functions, though moderate heterogeneity suggests effects may vary by context and study design.”
Many researchers have proposed that formal schooling is, in effect, a ‘global training program’ for executive functioning in addition to academics. These executive functioning skills generally fall into three categories:
- The first category is working memory, or the ability to hold and use thoughts in your mind over a short period of time.
- The second category is control over inhibitions, or the ability to control distractions and impulses.
- The third category is cognitive flexibility, or the ability to shift or change thinking when the rules change, when more information becomes available, or when a new problem presents itself.
Scientists have been interested in the
schooling effect
(or the “learning to learn” skills) for over thirty years, and have, with the advent of the term executive function, begun to connect the effects of schooling to the tasks of executive function and the acquisition of core knowledge, understanding, and skills.
Maturation is, of course, part of the equation. Children develop focus and concentration as they mature. But scientists have also begun to question the importance of schooling in developing executive function skills. It is hard to tell if children improve simply because their brains are biologically maturing or if the experience of going to school actually speeds up the process. For this reason, the team at the University of Massachusetts Boston wanted to isolate the specific impacts of the classroom environment from the natural effects of aging to determine the importance of each.
Using two groups of children – those who qualified for formal schooling a whole year earlier because their birthdays fell before the cutoff date, and those who had to wait another entire year to begin formal schooling – the researchers were able to compare these two groups of children who were biologically roughly the same age, but had vastly different exposure to formal schooling. Using a meta-analysis of data bases of studies spanning 28 years and many countries, they sought to compare children of similar ages who had different levels of schooling. They also had to use objective measures of executive function.
Their findings supported the idea that formal schooling does support executive function. “The results showed a clear difference. The children who experienced a year of schooling showed greater gains in executive functions than those who only grew a year older. The estimated effect size for the schooling group was higher than for the maturation-only group. This supports the idea that the classroom environment acts as a training ground for the brain.”
When we consider the multitude of demands that are placed on children in school as early as kindergarten, we realize the importance of executive function training. Students must learn to sit, focus, follow directions, take turns, remember and follow rules, share, anticipate, follow a schedule and deal with unexpected change,
and,
of course, learn to read, write and do math. It’s no wonder our students may come home from school suffering from
after school restraint collapse, and our advanced learners are not immune from this cognitive overload (some of which may be self-inflicted). Learning content and process is demanding.
So, what can we as educators and parents do to facilitate the development of executive function skills? Research suggests these ideas:
- Be consistent.
- Have clear expectations.
- Teach the process explicitly; e.g., “What does focus look like?” “What does flexibility mean?”
- Offer explanations and examples during the learning process.
- Allow for mistakes and treat them as part of the process.
- Know that learning itself is a process, and it will take time…sometimes lots of time.
- Realize that gifted kids may be asynchronous – their social, emotional, intellectual, and physical development may not be at the same level at the same time. Be patient.
- Love our children for who they are, not what they can do.
We must remember that executive function skills are not fixed traits; they develop over time, but they are highly predictive of future success. Spending time to hone these skills along with rigorous academics will serve our students well.
As always, I welcome your thoughts. Together we grow.
- Jackie Drummer, Past President and Current Board Advisor
Thank you to Esther Vazquez of the Appleton School District for this translation for our Spanish-speaking educators and families.
