Kelly B. Cartwright

Insights From Cognitive Neuroscience: The Importance of Executive Function for Early Reading Development and Education

Research Findings: Executive function begins to develop in infancy and involves an array of processes, such as attention, inhibition, working memory, and cognitive flexibility, which provide the means by which individuals control their own behavior, work toward goals, and manage complex cognitive processes. Thus, executive function plays a critical role in the development of academic skills such as reading. This article describes the development of executive function in young children, describes the brain structures and changes associated with that development, and then reviews recent research on the critical role of executive function in early reading development and education. Practice or Policy: Because executive function and its associated brain developments parallel reading acquisition, work in executive function has profound implications for fostering the successful development of reading skills, including prereading skills, word reading, and reading comprehension. Instruction that helps children learn to manage the multiple features of spoken and printed language will help ensure that children develop the reading-specific executive functions that will enable them to manage the complexities of reading processes throughout their lives.

Cognitive Development and Reading: The Relation of Reading-Specific Multiple Classification Skill to Reading Comprehension in Elementary School Children.

Cognitive flexibility, the ability to consider multiple aspects of stimuli simultaneously, develops over the elementary school years and can be measured with a multiple classification task. Although prior research indicates a significant relation between domain-general multiple classification skill (e.g., classifying objects by shape and color simultaneously) and reading, a precise relation between these abilities has not been found. A reading-specific multiple classification task was designed that required children to classify printed words along phonological and semantic dimensions simultaneously. Reading-specific multiple classification skill made a unique contribution to childrens reading comprehension over the contributions made by childrens age, domain-general multiple classification skill, decoding skill, and verbal ability. Additionally, training in reading-specific multiple classification facilitated childrens reading comprehension.

The Development of Graphophonological-Semantic Cognitive Flexibility and Its Contribution to Reading Comprehension in Beginning Readers

Reading-specific and general color-shape cognitive flexibility were assessed in 68 first and second graders to examine: 1) the development of graphophonological-semantic cognitive flexibility (the ability to process concurrently phonological and semantic aspects of print) in comparison to color-shape cognitive flexibility, 2) the contribution of reading experience to graphophonological-semantic flexibility, and 3) the unique contribution of graphophonological-semantic flexibility to reading comprehension. Second graders scored significantly higher than first graders on both cognitive flexibility tasks; the general flexibility task was easier for all children than the graphophonological-semantic flexibility task; reading experience contributed uniquely to childrens graphophonological-semantic flexibility; and graphophonological-semantic flexibility contributed significant, unique variance to childrens reading comprehension, consistent with Cartwrights (2002) work with second- to fourth-grade students and adults (2007).

The contribution of theory of mind, counterfactual reasoning, and executive function to pre-readers’ language comprehension and later reading awareness and comprehension in elementary school

The current longitudinal study examined the roles of theory of mind, counterfactual reasoning, and executive function in childrens pre-reading skills, reading awareness, and reading comprehension. It is the first to examine this set of variables with preschool and school-aged children. A sample of 31 children completed language comprehension, working memory, cognitive flexibility, first-order false belief, and counterfactual reasoning measures when they were 3 to 5 years of age and completed second-order false belief, cognitive flexibility, reading comprehension, and reading awareness measures at 6 to 9 years of age. Results indicated that false belief understanding contributed to phrase and sentence comprehension and reading awareness, whereas cognitive flexibility and counterfactual reasoning accounted for unique variance in reading comprehension. Implications of the results for the development of reading skill are discussed.

A Longitudinal Study of the Role of Reading Motivation in Primary Students' Reading Comprehension: Implications for a Less Simple View of Reading.

Although substantial research indicates motivation contributes significant variance to reading comprehension in upper elementary students, research with students in primary grades has focused, instead, on the relation of motivation to word reading. Assessment of reading motivation in 68 first and second graders indicated word and nonword reading were related to perceived competence in reading, whereas reading comprehension was significantly related to subjective value for reading. Motivation contributed significant, unique variance to reading comprehension concurrently and longitudinally (n = 31), beyond decoding ability, verbal ability, and reading-specific executive function. Findings have implications for theories of reading comprehension.

Factoring AAVE into Reading Assessment and Instruction.

In our increasingly diverse schools, students bring diverse ways of speaking to the classroom. In turn, as features from students’ home language varieties transfer into their readings of texts, teachers’ assessment and intervention plans may be directly affected. If teachers conflate dialect influence with reading error in Standard English, they may inaccurately assess students’ reading performance and propose inappropriate instructional plans. In this article we provide insights into the ways African American Vernacular English (AAVE) may influence reading assessments and subsequent instructional decisions. Additionally, we describe an intervention – contrastive analysis and code-switching – designed to help students become metacognitively aware of the multiple language varieties at work in their worlds. Newly aware of the structures and uses of home and school English, students learn to strategically choose the language variety appropriate to the context. In this way, factoring dialect into reading assessment and intervention results in improved literacy performance.

The Role of Motivation in Adults’ Reading Comprehension: A Lifespan View

Reading comprehension plays an integral role in adults’ daily lives and is thus central to adults’ positive life outcomes. Yet, millions of American adults lack the requisite reading skills necessary for basic literacy. Although research on adult literacy has traditionally focused on cognitive aspects of reading processes, the field has recently turned attention to the important role of positive, subjective factors such as motivation, in adults’ reading comprehension development. Expert adult readers read often, with interest, and are highly motivated, providing models of optimal life outcomes that point to potential areas of intervention for adults with low literacy.

Patterning, Reading, and Executive Functions

Detecting a pattern within a sequence of ordered units, defined as patterning, is a cognitive ability that is important in learning mathematics and influential in learning to read. The present study was designed to examine relations between first-grade children’s executive functions, patterning, and reading abilities, and to examine whether these relations differ by the type of pattern. The results showed that working memory correlated with reading fluency, and comprehension measures. Inhibition correlated only with the latter. Cognitive flexibility was correlated with patterning performance and with performance on object size patterns, whereas working memory was correlated with performance on symmetrical patterns and growing number patterns. These results suggest that the cognition required for completing patterns differs depending on the pattern type. Teachers may find it beneficial to place emphasis on the switching and working memory components of completing patterning tasks, depending on the type of patterns used in instruction.