Executive functions play a role in future academic achievement, interpersonal skills, and emotion regulation. To understand how to best measure these skills in young children, FPG Advanced Research Scientist Laura Kuhn, PhD, and colleagues compared three performance-based measures of executive functions that have been developed for preschoolers. The results of that work were published in “A Comparison of Three Executive Function Batteries in a Preschool-Aged Sample." This article, on which Kuhn was lead author, appeared in the July 2024 Children’s special issue entitled, “Cognitive and Linguistic Development in Children and Adolescents.”

The three performance-based measures of EF that the researchers studied are: the National Institutes of Health’s Toolbox Cognition Battery (NTCB), the Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence (WPPSI-IV), and the EF Touch battery. As a graduate student, Kuhn served on an FPG project that developed the EF Touch, which originally used paper and pencil. A second grant enabled Kuhn and colleagues to computerize the measure, which is free to use and appropriate for children ages 3 to 5 years old.

While the EF Touch has been shared throughout the United States and the world, as well as translated into several languages, this is the first research into how children’s performance on the EF Touch battery compares to other widely used EF assessments. The goal of the study was to “provide researchers and practitioners with guidance in battery selection by comparing a free battery with two batteries available for purchase.”

The study used a quota-based sampling approach to recruit 846 children from preschools in New York and North Carolina during the 2014 and 2015 calendar years. The impetus for the initial work was born from the study called the Family Life Project, which focused on rural poor communities in eastern North Carolina and Appalachia. “Our current work still has those threads where we're thinking about serving communities that are not as well-resourced and may not have access to expensive assessment tools,” said Kuhn.

The research team recruited children who were diverse in terms of race, ethnicity, household income, age, and gender, to reflect the diversity in 2012 U.S. Census data. The children were tested in their preschools by a research assistant in a one-time assessment of their EF abilities. In addition to comparing accuracy scores across the measures, researchers examined practical issues that could affect administration of the tests and contrasted these metrics across several demographic subpopulations.

“A lot of intervention work focuses on whether it improves preschoolers’ reading and math scores, which is of course very important,” said Kuhn. “But when it's an executive function intervention, it is nice to have a convenient tool to measure executive function so we can see if this executive function intervention improves executive function and then take the next step to say, does it also improve academic outcomes? These measures help us do that.”

Kuhn and her colleagues determined that the free EF Touch battery overwhelmingly performed similarly across a range of metrics when compared to the NTCB and WPPSI-IV, which are available for purchase. While the EF Touch battery was developed using a low-income and racially diverse sample, researchers found that it was not superior to the other tests in these groups. At the same time, the EF Touch performed better with younger children than the other batteries.

Kuhn said that the study showed that the EF Touch is a strong resource that is not cost prohibitive and can work with a diverse sector of preschoolers, specifically those who have additional needs and/or are younger. “Some of the standardized batteries, although they purport to cover a wide age range, aren’t as good for the youngest kids,” she said. “We also have items that assess the different domains of EF.”

The hope is that funding from a grant proposal currently under review at the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences will enable the team to modernize the battery, so it is more user friendly, adaptable with current technology, and appropriate for children up to first grade, beyond the current limit of age five. The current proposal would also include a validated Spanish translation.

“A lot of intervention work focuses on whether it improves preschoolers’ reading and math scores, which is of course very important,” said Kuhn. “But when it's an executive function intervention, it is nice to have a convenient tool to measure executive function so we can see if this executive function intervention improves executive function and then take the next step to say, does it also improve academic outcomes? These measures help us do that.”