Four-year-old Raj is helping you to gather leaves and stones. As he hunts around for materials, you remind him that there are ten children in class today, so he needs to collect ten leaves and ten stones. He sorts the materials into piles and counts the number of items in each pile. He realises that he has enough stones but is short of leaves. You help him collect four more.
Raj needs a lot of cognitive skills to keep on track – he has to remember the rule of ten throughout the task, and he has to pay attention while he counts, avoiding distractions. He has to switch between collecting and counting to keep track of how many of each resource he has. Once he has counted his piles, he has to work out how many more of each resource he needs. It’s not as simple as ‘just’ the maths skills of knowing numbers and comparing amounts.
These other cognitive skills are known as ‘executive functions’. Research suggests that they may be a key ingredient in early years maths learning. Executive functions (see box, overleaf) are a set of skills that we use to control and direct our behaviour towards goals. They are particularly important for novel or challenging tasks that require a high level of focus and thinking, such as mathematical learning.
Children who have lower executive functions tend to struggle to control their behaviour. They might be easily distracted, have difficulty remembering instructions, and have trouble switching between different tasks or different rules. If Raj has not fully developed his executive functions, for example, he may struggle to keep focused on the number ten, switch between collecting and counting, and count the prescribed resource – he may focus on items that are not relevant (such as flowers).
HOW DO EXECUTIVE FUNCTIONS LINK TO MATHS?
At the moment, the EYFS framework talks about maths and executive functions separately. Yet the two are interlinked.
THE ONE PROGRAMME
Research now shows that practising using executive functions in a maths context may help children to learn deeply and to develop strategies when they face unfamiliar maths in the future. Teams of researchers based in the UK, Canada and Australia have used this research to develop the ONE programme (‘Orchestrating Numeracy and the Executive’). The 12-week programme consists of a set of activities designed to encourage children to use their executive function skills to reach specific maths objectives. The activities are all play-based games that last between five and ten minutes, and aim to make maths and executive challenge fun. These included adaptations of familiar games such as hopscotch and musical statues, as well as specifically designed tasks building on key areas of the EYFS. Practitioners are also given training to help deliver the activities.
We found when developing the programme that knowledge of both executive functions and maths developed over the course of the programme: to start with, many practitioners were unaware of how executive functions support children’s thinking and how they relate to their maths learning. By the end of the professional development programme, practitioners had a better understanding of what executive functions mean.
They also valued learning about the broad range of maths skills children develop, in addition to just counting and recognising numbers.
In terms of benefits for children, researchers found that some children who took part made more progress in numeracy skills and some executive function skills than those who did not, and progress was larger for children experiencing economic disadvantage.
Practitioners overall reported that the activities worked well for the children, and that they were able to build three of the five- to ten-minute activities into their routine each week.
One said, ‘Mathematics has always been a priority in our routine, so there was not a major change. We are thinking more about executive functions. We know that just a few tweaks can make an activity more challenging.’
WHAT ARE EXECUTIVE FUNCTIONS?
Executive functions are a set of thinking skills that we use to control and direct our behaviour towards goals. One of these skills is working memory: the ability to remember information such as instructions for a short time, and respond appropriately; e.g., in our activities, the experimenter tapped a series of blocks in order and a child was asked to remember and copy the sequence. The second is inhibition, which helps us to ignore distractions or irrelevant information so that we can stay focused on a task; e.g., children were asked to tap fish as they moved across a screen, but to avoid tapping sharks. Finally, flexible thinking allows us to move from one task to another; e.g., children were asked to sort cards according to different rules.
Activity ideas
The ONE activities are built on the belief that there is no need for specific, expensive resources to support early years maths. All sorts of toys and resources can be used to introduce maths concepts. Here are some ideas for you to try out in your setting:
- Counting and number games: Throw a ball back and forth to practise counting one number at a time. Of course, this activity practises numbers and counting, but you can add executive challenge by asking the children to take turns in a specific order, while counting (e.g., one to Kai, two to Mila, three to Beth, and… back again, four to Kai, and so on). You can make it even more challenging for the confident children by practising counting backwards instead!
- Space and shape games: Make shapes with playdough to practise space and shape language, and place them in a simple configuration (e.g., red triangle above, blue circle below). Then hide the shapes you have made with a cloth. Can children reproduce the same shapes, from memory? Children with EAL in particular may not immediately remember the (English) shape names and spatial language, but they may well excel in reproducing the shapes, as this game does not require them to use the words explicitly.
- Order and pattern games: Practise putting toy cars in order from smallest to largest. You can add executive challenge by reversing the order and build in cognitive flexibility by changing the task goal: after ordering, can children sort the toy cars into piles, according to colour? This also requires them to remember the new rule. Can they work out which pile contains most cars? This new rule focuses on comparison again, but in a different way. Start with a small number of cars, and cars of two different colours only, to make the activity most accessible to children with SEND.
FURTHER INFORMATION
A larger-scale evaluation of the ONE in 150 settings is being supported by the EEF and DfE. We expect the results to be published on our findings in early 2025. See https://theone.web.ox.ac.uk or contact theone@psy.ox.ac.uk
