Intraindividual dynamics of primary school students' executive functioning: Accuracy and response-time

Abstract

We go beyond cross-sectional studies of executive functioning (EF) to investigate intraindividual dynamics of accuracy and response-times. Forty-three 8–11 year-old children (M_age = 9 years 11 months, 51.2 % boys) completed the Mixed block (including both congruent and incongruent trials) of the Hearts and Flowers task on tablets twice per school-day during two weeks (n_ti = 651). Specifying Residual Dynamic Structural Equation Models (RDSEM) novel findings emerged. Children became less accurate and respond faster over time. Both state-accuracy and state-response-time were relatively stable over time. State-accuracy-on-response-time-slopes showed that children with a relatively lower trait-accuracy performed more accurately when they slowed down. In contrast, children with a relatively higher trait-accuracy performed at the same level of accuracy regardless whether they accelerated or decelerated. An intraindividual approach to EF provides an important window into the children's accuracy-speed trade-off and cognition in a naturalistic school context.

Educational relevance

While developmental trends of children's executive functions and between-person differences are relatively well established in the literature, we know less about the processes from situation to situation in everyday learning environments. For learning, children rely on their self-monitoring and self-regulation to adjust their pace in learning contexts, for example slowing down for new topics, or speeding up for known contents. Teachers monitor children's accuracy both as immediate and longer-term outcomes, and can provide feedback to them in case they need to slow down, or nudge them to speed up in learning situations. In order to understand how children regulate this speed/accuracy trade-off from one lesson to another, from one day to another, we investigated how their executive functions (EF) unfolded during lessons and days at school. In particular, we investigated the dynamics between accuracies (how correctly they responded) and response times (how fast they responded) when they completed the Mixed bock of the Hearts and Flowers executive function task up to twice a day for ten school days. Importantly we found when children with lower overall accuracy performed more accurately when they slowed down, while speed had no impact on the accuracy of children with higher overall accuracy. This speed/accuracy trade-off is as important for learning tasks at school as it is for completing EF tasks. Understanding how this speed/accuracy trade-off ebbs and flows lesson-to-lesson and day-to-day for different children gives unique insights into variability in cognitive capacities that teachers encounter each lesson. It is in this situation-to-situation context that teachers interact with, get involved with, dedicate resources to, and provide support to children depending on their need for slowing down or speeding up.