Executive functioning is important for a child’s development of complex and analytical thinking, and in dyslexics, sometimes executive functioning skills are not fully developed, leading to difficulties in comprehension in all sorts of school subjects.
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It’s important to help a dyslexic child develop those analysis skills at a young age; and new research has found that children show signs of high-level thinking skills at an earlier age than originally thought.
The University of Chicago and the University of North Carolina have found that as early as age four-and-a-half, children begin to show those high-level thinking skills in a paper titled "Early Executive Function Predicts Reasoning Development."
The study tracked over 1,300 children’s analytical reasoning, executive function, and vocabulary knowledge in three checkpoints: first grade, third grade, and at age 15. The study found that children showed signs of ability to control their responses to stimuli, and those children who had high scores at an early age were better suited to understand complex problems later in life.
“Overall, these results show that knowledge is necessary for using thinking skills, as shown by the importance of early vocabulary, but also inhibitory control and executive functioning skills are important contributors to children's analytical reasoning development,” Lindsey Richland, assistant professor in comparative human development at the University of Chicago said.
What are your thoughts on this study? Share them in the comments below! Also, for more information, read our page on executive function problems.