Executive Skills

Success in college requires different skills than high school. He/she may need to strengthen certain skills in order to handle college level work and life away from home. To determine strengths and weaknesses, your student will complete a self-assessment, but this self-assessment is only part of the picture. As parents, our own skill strengths and weaknesses impact our ability to offer support. To complete the picture, I ask parents to complete an assessment of their own abilities. Based on the results, together we’ll craft a plan to leverage your student’s strengths and bolster the weaker areas.

For more information about executive function skills, I highly recommend Smart But Scattered Teens by Richard Guare, PhD, Peg Dawson, EdD, and Colin Guare. The assessments I use are adapted from this resource.

Executive Skills include:

Response Inhibition - the capacity to think before you act

Working Memory - the ability to hold information in memory while performing complex tasks

Emotional Control - the ability to manage emotions to achieve goals, complete tasks, or control and direct behavior

Flexibility - the ability to revise plans in the face of obstacles, setbacks, new information, or mistakes

Sustained Attention - the capacity to keep paying attention to a situation or task in spite of distractibility, fatigue or boredom

Task Initiation - the ability to begin projects without undue procrastination, in an efficient and timely fashion

Planning/prioritization - the ability to create a road map to reach a goal or to complete a task

Organization - the ability to create and maintain systems to keep track of information or materials

Time management - the capacity to estimate how much time one has, how to allocate it, and how to stay within time limits and deadlines