What is Executive Functioning and Why it's Important?

Most college students excel at skills necessary for being college ready. These skills are also connected with a success of a student in grade/high school. With this being said, these skills are often coined executive functioning. Now that we have established what a general usefulness of executive function, but what is it?  Executive Functioning is a collection of skills that affects an individual’s ability to organize and act out cognitive and physical thoughts to achieve a goal. These collections of skills include:

o        Impulse Control

       §Regulating impulsive and inappropriate behavior from occurring.

o        Emotional Control 

       §Controlling and checking emotional responses- tends to affect dealing with stress, failure and others form of stresses. 

o        Flexible Thinking

       § Open-mindedness towards new ways of thinking and the unexpected events. 

o        Working Memory

       §Also, called short-term memory, this is where learning new information takes places at.

o        Self-Monitoring

       §Assessing self-progress towards a goal/desire. 

o        Planning and Prioritizing

       §Selecting and achieving a goal or desire and partaking in the necessary step to the goal.

o        Task Initiation

       §Starting and stopping old and new tasks.

o        Organization

       §Keeping items/ideas in groups, so one can effectively retrieve them at a later time or date.

These skills collectively influence how a student of any level approaches academic and nonacademic work. An example of this is how an individual approaches addresses an problem or a decision choice. An everyday decision that is related to decision making is planning an activity. Without the skills listed above that as person typically has, planning any activity may become a challenge. An example is if a person lacks in flexible thinking, a person who plans activity and one-thing changes may actually cancel the completely planned activity because of one little change, instead of adapting/changing the activity due to the change. Overall, executive functioning is often over looked since most of the skills are acquired naturally in most cases. However, the word most does not mean always occurs; knowing how well you executive functioning is and address an issue can improve your academic and nonacademic abilities substantially.