Sprecher
Beschreibung
Executive functions (EF) are critical predictors of long-term outcomes in children, including academic success and socio-emotional development. In response, numerous preventive and therapeutic programs have been developed to enhance EF skills. Early generations of these programs focused on direct EF training but yielded limited long-term effects and struggled with the transfer of skills from clinical settings to everyday contexts. In recent years, a shift has occurred toward embedding EF interventions within naturalistic environments—particularly classrooms—while simultaneously leveraging the quality of teacher-student interactions as a fertile ground for EF development.
These newer, multi-component interventions show promising results. However, they have often been constructed based on expert opinion rather than a systematic understanding of which contextual strategies are truly effective and through which mechanisms they work. In this keynote, we present a comprehensive investigation into the causal impact of contextual strategies on EF development. By disentangling the active ingredients within EF programs, we aim to clarify why certain interventions outperform others. This holds the potential to inform the next generation of EF interventions—ones that are not only more effective but also more scalable and fully grounded in evidence.