This study explored the effects of pedagogical approaches on Title I kindergarten students' executive function (EF) and academic achievement to test the hypothesis that children, especially those from low socioeconomic backgrounds, will benefit when purposeful play is incorporated into learning. Students in the play-based group generally had…

A classroom randomized efficacy trial conducted over four years in 7 community-based preschool and 6 Head Start programs investigated effects of the Second Step Early Learning (SSEL) curriculum on end of preschool executive functioning (EF) and social-emotional (SE) skills in low-income children. Outcomes are reported for n=770 four-year-olds…

Twenty-four 3.5-year-old children who initially showed poor performance on false-belief tasks participated in a training protocol designed to promote performance on these tasks. Our aim was to determine whether the extent to which children benefited from training was predicted by their performance on a battery of executive functioning tasks.…