School Psychology
LECTURE 1
- A school psychologist; supports student’s ability to learn and teachers ability
to teach; experts in learning, behaviour, mental health and school systems
- Executive functions; umbrella term for various cognitive processes that give
rise to goal-directed behaviour; novel and demanding situations, flexible
adjustment, adaptive behaviour, creativity (the monitoring and self-regulation
of thought and action, the ability to plan behaviour and to inhibit inappropriate
responses)
- Three core components of executive function; working memory, inhibitory
control and mental flexibility - plays a role in concentration, juggling multiple
demands, adapting to changing circumstances, working with others, dealing
with setbacks, inhibiting immediate rewards
- Consequences of low executive functioning; worse school performance,
difficult keeping jobs, lower income, difficulties maintaining relationships,
increased risk for mental health problems
- Allows children to focus and adapt their behaviour appropriately, when a child
is underdeveloped in this area this may look like deliberate ignorance of
instructions
- Working memory; ability to hold information in mind (maintenance) and
mentally work with it (manipulation)
- Inhibitory control; the ability to suppress interfering thoughts and actions that
are not relevant to the task at hand
- Cognitive flexibility; the ability to change one’s perspective or approach to a
problem, flexibility adjusting to new demands, rules or priorities
- These functions are not entirely independent
- More complex executive functions; core executive functions are the building
blocks of more complex functions (planning, reasoning, problem solving,
performance monitoring)
- Measures of executive functioning; used for research on (the development)
executive functioning - often used in clinical/school settings - executive
functions are most often impaired in clinical groups (ADHD, learning
disabilities, depression)
,- Development of executive functioning; unlike other processes these three
components develop throughout the adolescence and into the adulthood
- Go/No-Go task; testing inhibitory control by presenting stimuli with certain
instructions and some stimuli to which the participant is not meant so react,
the more trials there are the task becomes more difficult, adults are better
than children
- Measures of complex executive functions; advantages (better predictor of
executive function problems in daily life, better predictor of school
performance) and disadvantages (more difficult to identify disability)
- Tower of London/Hanoi task; a task to measure spatial problem solving,
planning, impulsivity - task difficulty increases with the number of moves
needed to solve the problem (adults take more time to plan the first move and
are better able to adjust their behaviour in the task)
- The Stroop Task; tests complex inhibition by suppressing an automatic
response to colours and reacting to letters - difficult to use with children
- Day and Night Task; an age appropriate stroop task - they are instructed to
connect a picture of a sun with the night and a picture of the moon with the
day (performance improves between the age of 3 and 7)
- Delayed gratification task; the longer the child waits the better able the child is
to self regulate
- Delay discounting task; this is a task meant for adults to test self regulation
- Dimensional Change Card Sorting Test (DCCS); testing cognitive flexibility,
switching/shifting, inability to switch between tasks (preservation), this ability
is developed at the age of 3 - they know the rule but cannot switch what they
have learned, much like frontal brain damage patients
- Wisconsin Card Sorting Task; this task has more rules than the DCCS, no
explicit instructions about the rule, no instructions when the rule changes, you
have to infer sorting rule based on feedback (feedback learning - performance
monitoring)
- Executive functioning relies mostly on the prefrontal cortex (PFC) function;
DLPFC (working memory), OFC (inhibition), MPFC (cognitive flexibility)
- Developmental neuroscience methods; patients with frontal lobe damage or
rugby players are used for locating certain brain areas in change of executive
functions - studying brain structure (MRI) and brain function (fMRI)
- Feedback learning; learning from (feedback on) previous behaviour is
essential, relies on multiple executive functions, used to study learning in
, laboratory settings - good results on this task predicted maths and reading
fluency (school performance) two years later
- Adolescence and executive functioning; characterised by impulsivity, not
thinking about long-term consequences, difficulty planning - executive
functioning deficit (more controlled by emotion, PFC better developed than in
children) - adolescents are more driven by immediate reward and emotion
- However, excessive pruning of brain cells occurs in the executive functioning
brain regions, DLPFC develops late - some brain areas are developed early
and some more late (imbalance of the limbic system and prefrontal area)
- Individual differences; performance on the Marshmallow Test predicted
performance on the emotional go/no-go task 40 years later; individual
differences are seen very early in development
- Metacognition; knowledge about cognition, including metamemory
(knowledge about memory) and knowing the demands made by different
cognitive tasks
1. Can executive functioning be trained and/or improved? If so, how would you
improve it, and why would this work?
2. Is it possible to impair executive functioning? If so, how would it be impaired, and
why?
LECTURE 2
- Working memory; ability to maintain and manipulate information, has limited
capacity (once the information is forgotten it is gone for good) - necessary for
planning, reasoning, problem solving and performance monitoring (higher
order cognitive processes)
- Long-term memory; declarative or explicit memory (episodic and semantic)
and procedural or implicit memory
- Modular system of memory; hippocampus and medial-temporal lobe (episodic
memory), motor cortex (skill learning)
- Memory; mental representations of experiences that are constructed based
on prior knowledge and personal interpretation
- Quality of memory; depends on the ability to understand the experience,
symbolic understanding, language proficiency and metacognition
LECTURE 1
- A school psychologist; supports student’s ability to learn and teachers ability
to teach; experts in learning, behaviour, mental health and school systems
- Executive functions; umbrella term for various cognitive processes that give
rise to goal-directed behaviour; novel and demanding situations, flexible
adjustment, adaptive behaviour, creativity (the monitoring and self-regulation
of thought and action, the ability to plan behaviour and to inhibit inappropriate
responses)
- Three core components of executive function; working memory, inhibitory
control and mental flexibility - plays a role in concentration, juggling multiple
demands, adapting to changing circumstances, working with others, dealing
with setbacks, inhibiting immediate rewards
- Consequences of low executive functioning; worse school performance,
difficult keeping jobs, lower income, difficulties maintaining relationships,
increased risk for mental health problems
- Allows children to focus and adapt their behaviour appropriately, when a child
is underdeveloped in this area this may look like deliberate ignorance of
instructions
- Working memory; ability to hold information in mind (maintenance) and
mentally work with it (manipulation)
- Inhibitory control; the ability to suppress interfering thoughts and actions that
are not relevant to the task at hand
- Cognitive flexibility; the ability to change one’s perspective or approach to a
problem, flexibility adjusting to new demands, rules or priorities
- These functions are not entirely independent
- More complex executive functions; core executive functions are the building
blocks of more complex functions (planning, reasoning, problem solving,
performance monitoring)
- Measures of executive functioning; used for research on (the development)
executive functioning - often used in clinical/school settings - executive
functions are most often impaired in clinical groups (ADHD, learning
disabilities, depression)
,- Development of executive functioning; unlike other processes these three
components develop throughout the adolescence and into the adulthood
- Go/No-Go task; testing inhibitory control by presenting stimuli with certain
instructions and some stimuli to which the participant is not meant so react,
the more trials there are the task becomes more difficult, adults are better
than children
- Measures of complex executive functions; advantages (better predictor of
executive function problems in daily life, better predictor of school
performance) and disadvantages (more difficult to identify disability)
- Tower of London/Hanoi task; a task to measure spatial problem solving,
planning, impulsivity - task difficulty increases with the number of moves
needed to solve the problem (adults take more time to plan the first move and
are better able to adjust their behaviour in the task)
- The Stroop Task; tests complex inhibition by suppressing an automatic
response to colours and reacting to letters - difficult to use with children
- Day and Night Task; an age appropriate stroop task - they are instructed to
connect a picture of a sun with the night and a picture of the moon with the
day (performance improves between the age of 3 and 7)
- Delayed gratification task; the longer the child waits the better able the child is
to self regulate
- Delay discounting task; this is a task meant for adults to test self regulation
- Dimensional Change Card Sorting Test (DCCS); testing cognitive flexibility,
switching/shifting, inability to switch between tasks (preservation), this ability
is developed at the age of 3 - they know the rule but cannot switch what they
have learned, much like frontal brain damage patients
- Wisconsin Card Sorting Task; this task has more rules than the DCCS, no
explicit instructions about the rule, no instructions when the rule changes, you
have to infer sorting rule based on feedback (feedback learning - performance
monitoring)
- Executive functioning relies mostly on the prefrontal cortex (PFC) function;
DLPFC (working memory), OFC (inhibition), MPFC (cognitive flexibility)
- Developmental neuroscience methods; patients with frontal lobe damage or
rugby players are used for locating certain brain areas in change of executive
functions - studying brain structure (MRI) and brain function (fMRI)
- Feedback learning; learning from (feedback on) previous behaviour is
essential, relies on multiple executive functions, used to study learning in
, laboratory settings - good results on this task predicted maths and reading
fluency (school performance) two years later
- Adolescence and executive functioning; characterised by impulsivity, not
thinking about long-term consequences, difficulty planning - executive
functioning deficit (more controlled by emotion, PFC better developed than in
children) - adolescents are more driven by immediate reward and emotion
- However, excessive pruning of brain cells occurs in the executive functioning
brain regions, DLPFC develops late - some brain areas are developed early
and some more late (imbalance of the limbic system and prefrontal area)
- Individual differences; performance on the Marshmallow Test predicted
performance on the emotional go/no-go task 40 years later; individual
differences are seen very early in development
- Metacognition; knowledge about cognition, including metamemory
(knowledge about memory) and knowing the demands made by different
cognitive tasks
1. Can executive functioning be trained and/or improved? If so, how would you
improve it, and why would this work?
2. Is it possible to impair executive functioning? If so, how would it be impaired, and
why?
LECTURE 2
- Working memory; ability to maintain and manipulate information, has limited
capacity (once the information is forgotten it is gone for good) - necessary for
planning, reasoning, problem solving and performance monitoring (higher
order cognitive processes)
- Long-term memory; declarative or explicit memory (episodic and semantic)
and procedural or implicit memory
- Modular system of memory; hippocampus and medial-temporal lobe (episodic
memory), motor cortex (skill learning)
- Memory; mental representations of experiences that are constructed based
on prior knowledge and personal interpretation
- Quality of memory; depends on the ability to understand the experience,
symbolic understanding, language proficiency and metacognition
