The Role of Executive Functions in Reading and Writing

Reading comprehension is often affected by executive function differences. Here are some instructional strategies to strengthen the cognitive skills and strategies students need to regulate their thinking while reading. - Help students understand how they think and learn. - Support self-awareness of learning profiles, strengths, and areas for growth. - Provide clear purposes and goals for reading tasks. - Teach strategies for organizing ideas, including the use of templates, thinking maps, and graphic organizers. - Help students activate background knowledge before reading. Use graphic organizers to visually present key topics and concepts. - Pose questions before and during reading to help students make predictions about a text’s content based on clues from the text. - Teach students to identify and use text structures in both narrative and informational texts. Preview structure before reading. - Teach students how to generate questions before, during, and after reading to stay focused and engaged as they seek answers to the questions. - Encourage students to create mental images to support memory and understanding. - Teach students to retell and summarize key ideas to identify essential information. Check out this document with definitions on the different executive functions and support strategies to try. Keys to Literacy shares a video on The Role of Executive Functions on Reading and Writing.