To what extent is reading comprehension supported by executive functions?
10 January 2024
Although it is widely known that information is best presented with a degree of repetition, as well as by repeating and reviewing key concepts, such an approach is most effective when pupils are able to read widely and often, with fluency and comprehension. Decades of research point to the importance of self-regulation and metacognitive awareness as key predictors of reading comprehension and the ability to access a broad and rich curriculum. Teaching in small chunks with repetition and being mindful of activities that require too much memory capacity in the spirit of ‘cognitive load theory’ is likely to hold many pupils back, so in this post I examine the relationship between reading comprehension, executive functions and rhythm-based teaching.
What are executive functions and why do they matter?
Just as we may need to ‘read the room’ to gauge a social context, mood and emotional tone, we also need to ‘read’ information on the page or screen with the same level of sensitivity and awareness. However, while the dynamics of a live social situation, or the events of a movie play out in real time before our eyes and ears, the situation on the page requires a more sustained and selective engagement on the part of the reader if they are to extract and assimilate the maximum understanding of the text.
This level of engagement involves ‘metacognition’, which is an aspect of social understanding that requires a person to monitor the degree to which they are successfully appraising a situation.
Metacognition is a form of social awareness, whereas self-regulation is more about a person’s awareness of their own behaviour and priorities.
Self-regulation is a form of goal-directed behaviour that includes:
- prioritising relevant actions,
- inhibiting (suppressing) those that are less relevant.
Therefore, inhibition is a core aspect of self-regulation. Both metacognition and self-regulation can facilitate reading comprehension in terms of the degree of overall engagement. There is also a more dynamic quality to understanding a text, which involves:
- being able to adapt flexibly to the development of the narrative,
- the shifting of perspective as necessary in order to maintain comprehension.
So far we have considered forward planning, cognitive flexibility - also known as ‘shifting’,and control of inhibition. These elements of cognitive control are referred to under the ‘umbrella term’, ‘executive functions’.
Are executive functions mentioned in the Simple View of Reading?
When people read a text, they draw upon prior knowledge, whether they realise it or not. They assume that the most likely course of events will unfold. For example, baking a cake precedes eating a cake. An unexpected turn of events might derail this assumption if say, the cake turned out to be a birthday present. Under the altered circumstances, the reader would adapt and apply a new schema (prior knowledge of birthday cakes) and reappraise their orientation and understanding of the text.
One of the most discussed aspects of executive function, ‘working memory’, varies considerably between people. In the context of language comprehension, in speech and in print, ‘working memory’ holds fragments of information in such a way that new information can be assimilated immediately, enriching, evolving and expanding previous impressions. Encoding (the process of updating or taking in information from the senses) is likely to involve both verbal and envisioned impressions, as creating this record of verbal information in the form of an image (like a movie in the mind) helps to enhance long-term memory formation.
In social situations, people tend to use language to imply what has taken place, and this means that an important part of social engagement involves filling the gaps with inferences that make use of tone of voice, gestures and facial expression, for example. Children with a limited working memory capacity are more literal in their response to language - relying more on a skeleton framework, whereas those with a more capacious working memory are more likely to enjoy a more playful and exploratory approach, to making these inferences.
In the Simple View of Reading (SVR), Gough and Tumner (1986) stated that reading comprehension is predicted by fluent decoding skills and oral language skills. Their model did not included executive function. Given that working memory, inhibition, sustained and selective attention, and cognitive flexibility underpin reading comprehension, this would appear to be an overly simplistic view.
However, in a study that examined the role of executive functions on young children’s reading comprehension (Dolean et al, 2021), a large proportion of the variance in reading scores was explained by executive function at the initial (baseline) testing, but not at the follow-up six months later. The authors noticed that this outcome was likely to be due to the high number of fluent decoders in their sample. However, language skills at baseline did predict reading comprehension in the follow-up tests. The researchers seemed to assume that executive functions, like language skills would accumulate with time in children. It is possible that these are more dynamic than language skills and are more likely in the short term to change in response to the immediate environment.
The relationship between executive functions, reading comprehension and rhythm-based training.
An interesting pattern has emerged from the research literature on the development of reading comprehension:
- Struggling readers rely more on fluent decoding.
- Fluent readers rely more on oral language skills.
The effects of executive functions on reading comprehension scores were stronger among children who relied on decoding rather than language skills
This findings bring us back to a ‘common sense view’ of reading comprehension which is:
- Weaker executive functions such as working memory, control of inhibition, attention and cognitive flexibility are associated with children who rely more on decoding strategies in their reading comprehension.
- Children who rely more on oral language skills and less on decoding, access reading comprehension with minimal effort in terms of executive function.
If performance on executive functions does predict fluent decoding in reading development, then it follows that changes in executive function would impact fluent decoding and influence reading comprehension scores.
There are many studies showing the effects of musical training on executive function (Hallam and Himonides, 2022). In particular, these studies have repeatedly shown the benefits of rhythm-based training on working memory. One recent study, measured working memory before and after a rhythm-based music intervention in young Finish children, and showed a statistically significant effect of:
- rhythm-based training on working memory,
- improved reading development among the children with lower baseline reading scores.
The three studies mentioned in this blog post point to three key findings:
- the importance of executive function for the development of reading,
- that children who are more likely to struggle with reading at school are more likely to need support through the development of executive function,
- that rhythm-based training supports the development of executive function among children who have lower baseline reading scores.
Rhythm and executive functions
The studies also showed that we can think of executive functions as ‘team players’ in the following way:
- Inhibitory control is an important element of sustained and selective attention and self-regulation.
- Sustained and selective attention is an important component of working memory.
- Working memory capacity enables cognitive flexibility.
- Cognitive flexibility and working memory capacity enable metacognition.
As teachers are well-aware, if executive functions are limited or imbalanced, they can lead to low-level disruption in the classroom, and the extent to which a positive day-to-day learning environment can be maintained.
Schools using the Rhythm for Reading programme have discovered it has developed children’s executive functions. For over a decade, many children have benefited from the effects of the ten week programme of rhythm-based training (only ten minutes per week) with substantial improvements in:
- Reading behaviour - accuracy, fluency and comprehension,
- Sustained and selective attention - better ability to focus and concentrate in the classroom,
- Improved working memory - increased assimilation of meaning while reading - ie comprehension,
- Inhibitive control - stronger self-regulation and the ability to ignore distractions and complete given tasks,
- Cognitive flexibility - improvement in updating and predicting the likely direction of events in the passage of text,
To learn more about the Rhythm for Reading programme and executive function, click here.
To read about our results in case study schools, click here.
To discuss having Rhythm for Reading in your school, click here to book a discovery call.
If you enjoyed this post on reading comprehension, keep reading!
How does the Rhythm for Reading programme actually work?
The logical forms and hierarchical structures that are integral to the Rhythm for Reading audio-visual resources automatically train children to recognise grammatical structures, align with phrase contours and activate the associative priming mechanism (Jones and Estes, 2012) while they read printed language (Long, 2014).
Three factors to take into account when assessing reading comprehension
Factor one: There is minimal cognitive loading of working memory as the child can refer back to the text when answering questions. In other words, they do not need to remember the passage of text, whilst answering the questions. This approach prevents a conflation between a test of comprehension and a test of working memory. Children may score higher on NARA II if working memory is likely to reach overload in other reading test formats, for example, if the child is required to retain the details of the text whilst answering comprehension questions.
Rhythm and Reading Comprehension 1/5
In the Simple View of Reading, reading comprehension is described as the ‘product of’ skilled decoding and linguistic comprehension (Gough & Tumner, 1986). A focus on oracy (for example Barton, 2018) highlights a focus in some schools on linguistic comprehension. According to researchers, the proportion of children beginning school with speech, language and communication needs is estimated at between 7 and 20 per cent (McKean, 2017) and unfortunately, communication issues carry a risk of low self-esteem and problems with self-confidence (Dockerall et al., 2017).
References
Ahokas et al., (2023) Rhythm and reading: Connecting the training of musical rhythm to the development of literacy skills,PsyArXiv; 2023. DOI: 10.31234/osf.io/7ehwu.
Dolean, D. et al., (2021) Language skills, and not executive functions, predict the development of reading comprehension of early readers: evidence from an orthographically transparent language, Reading and writing, 341: 1491-1512.
Gough, P.B. and Tumner, W. (1986) Decoding, reading, and writing disability. Remedial and Special Education, 7, 6-10.
Hallam, S. and Himonides, E. (2022) The Power of Music: An Exploration of the Evidence, Cambridge UK: Open Book Publishers
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