Department of Psychology and Behavioral Sciences, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China.
Hangzhou No. 4 High School, Hangzhou, China.
Dev Sci. 2019 Mar;22(2):e12748. doi: 10.1111/desc.12748. Epub 2018 Oct 8.
Executive function (EF), its importance for scholastic achievement and the question of whether or not EF is malleable, have become a topic of intense interest. Education or schooling is often seen as effective approaches to enhance EF due to the specific school-related requirements as compared to kindergarten or pre-school. However, no study to date has investigated whether targeted training focusing on those domains might be comparable with regular schooling in improving EF and fluid intelligence (Gf). The aim of the present study was to replicate and extend the previously demonstrated schooling effects on EF by using a school-cutoff design, and to further investigate whether a theoretically motivated intervention targeting specific EF, i.e., working memory (WM) or inhibitory control (IC), could achieve comparable effects with schooling in both, WM and IC, as well as Gf. 91 6-year-old kindergarteners and first-graders with similar chronological age participated the study. We compared the performance of a first-grade schooling group with that of two kindergarten training groups as well as a business-as-usual kindergarten control group. Participants were assessed in WM, IC and Gf at baseline, immediately after the intervention (posttest), as well as 3 months after training completion (follow-up). The results showed that the schooling group indeed outperformed the kindergarten groups at baseline in several cognitive tasks. Furthermore, both the WM and IC training showed pronounced gains in the trained tasks, as well as varying degrees of improvement in non-trained outcome measures. Most importantly, both training groups achieved comparable performance with the schooling group, which was especially apparent in Gf at follow-up. Our findings provide further evidence for the malleability of EF demonstrating that both, long-term and short-term interventions can facilitate the acquisition of those important skills, and as such, our work has important implications for educational practice.
执行功能（EF）及其对学业成就的重要性，以及 EF 是否可塑的问题，已成为人们关注的焦点。由于与幼儿园或学前班相比，学校有特定的与学习相关的要求，因此教育或学校教育通常被视为增强 EF 的有效方法。然而，迄今为止，没有研究调查过专注于这些领域的有针对性的培训是否可以与正规学校教育相媲美，以提高执行功能和流体智力（Gf）。本研究的目的是使用学校截止设计复制和扩展先前证明的学校教育对 EF 的影响，并进一步调查针对特定 EF（即工作记忆（WM）或抑制控制（IC））的理论驱动干预是否可以在 WM 和 IC 以及 Gf 方面取得与学校教育相当的效果。91 名 6 岁的幼儿园和一年级学生具有相似的年龄，参加了这项研究。我们将一年级学校教育组的表现与两个幼儿园培训组以及一个正常的幼儿园对照组进行了比较。参与者在基线、干预后立即（后测）以及培训完成后 3 个月（随访）时进行 WM、IC 和 Gf 的评估。结果表明，在几个认知任务中，学校组确实优于幼儿园组。此外，WM 和 IC 培训都在训练任务中表现出明显的收益，并且在非训练的结果测量中也有不同程度的提高。最重要的是，两个培训组都取得了与学校组相当的表现，尤其是在随访时的 Gf 方面。我们的研究结果进一步证明了 EF 的可塑性能，表明长期和短期干预都可以促进这些重要技能的获得，因此我们的工作对教育实践具有重要意义。
