Why is this research valuable?

Executive functions (EF) are cognitive skills for managing attention, emotions and behaviour, and they play a central role in facilitating learning. Executive functions have been suggested as potential targets for early education interventions because of their strong links with academic achievement, but previous intervention studies have shown mixed results. Training executive functions alone does not seem to reliably lead to improvements in children’s mathematics. As a research team, we were puzzled by these previous intervention failures and hypothesized that embedding executive function challenge into the context of math learning activities would be more beneficial. We also worked with educators to make the intervention as accessible and feasible as possible across different preschool settings.  

The present study focused on the impact of this integrated intervention in preschool children, as this age represents a period of a rapid cognitive development. In addition, research suggests that children’s mathematics skills at school entry are predictive of later performance, therefore, early intervention is particularly important. Furthermore, because early cognitive skills are malleable, intervening at an early age is highly valuable, because it has the potential to benefit children who might be growing in conditions of disadvantage and offers a window of opportunity for societal uplift. 

What did the authors do?

 We tested the efficacy of the Orchestrating Numeracy and the Executive (“ONE”) programme. The programme consists of activities for children designed to support an integration of mathematics and EF. Activities were co-developed with early years educators, to ensure that the activities were well suited to the early learning environments, and participating educators received professional development to increase their knowledge about the importance of the early executive functions and mathematical thinking. The programme was 12 weeks long and took place in the nurseries. Early years practitioners conducted the proposed activities with children. The activities were playful but rigorous, and designed with early years practitioners to be flexible in delivery and easily incorporated into any nursery routines.

To test the efficacy of the programme, we allocated 103 children to the intervention group and 90 to the control group who experienced normal classroom routines. Children were assessed on a range of mathematics and executive functions tasks before the intervention and five months later. We predicted that the mathematics scores would improve to a greater degree in the intervention group than in the control group. In addition, we were interested in testing whether the intervention would benefit children from economically disadvantaged backgrounds. In this study, economic disadvantage was defined by eligibility for early year UK government support (Early Years Pupil Premium), an index that reflects low parental income. We found that mathematics scores improved more in the intervention group as compared to scores of the control group, and more so for children growing up in economic disadvantage.    

In addition to testing improvement in mathematics, we wanted to understand whether the intervention had an impact on the interplay between EF and mathematics. To test this, we implemented sophisticated statistical analyses (graph-theory-based networks). We discovered that EF and mathematics measures showed greater interconnectedness after the intervention.

Implications of the study 

We found that an integrated EF and mathematics intervention had positive effects on early numeracy. This is in line with a recent proposal that embedding EF challenge in mathematics activities may lead to deeper processing and learning (Scerif et al., 2023), and emphasises the importance of considering co-developing functions in early learning. The study also highlights the important of co-producing interventions with early years educators, to maximise the likelihood of implementing activities and accessing professional development for this under-served group of educators who are crucial to early learning. 

Interventions such as The ONE may be particularly beneficial for children who grow up in economic disadvantage, perhaps because they provide playful access to activities that enhance EF and mathematics. Play-based integrated interventions may provide a potential tool for intervening and supporting learning and motivation in the early years, before the attainment gap widens. In this study, economic disadvantage was defined using a variable that reflects parental income. To gain a better understanding of how disadvantage affects children’s attainment, future studies need to consider a full range of additional factors, such as differences in support and instruction across, and exposure to, early years settings, family practices, parental education and cultural differences.