SERIES: THE COMMERCE OF NEUROSCIENCE

Part 1: For the past decade or so, one buzzword in education has been “executive function.” Never mind learning the quadratic formula; let’s help kids stay organized, think clearly, stay focused. An industry has popped up called “executive function coaching” — but some educators and researchers wonder if the science behind the approach supports its steep price tag. 

When Lilli Stordeur was halfway through her freshman year at Northampton High School, it was clear she didn’t need help with just one subject. She needed help with most of them.

“I was being tutored for the classes I was having trouble in,” she says, “but I was still not doing well in school, because I would be having a hard time organizing my binders and notebooks and stuff, and knowing when to hand things in.”

So her parents hired Melissa Power-Greene, a former tutor and special ed teacher.

On a recent afternoon, Power-Greene and Lilli sit at a table in the family dining room, ready to start working on an English assignment. “So just to be clear, we’re going to outline the essay…..and talk about how to read more efficiently,” Power-Greene starts. “Does that sound good?”

Power-Greene is an executive function coach. She works for the Massachusetts-based company Beyond Booksmart.

Executive functions are categories of skills the brain uses for general organization and judgement. They include attention and focus, working memory, impulse-control, self-evaluation.

Power-Greene helps Lilli, now a senior, prioritize assignments, arrange her notes, gear up to talk to teachers, even prepare for college interviews.

“When I did tutoring, it was working on helping the student do this set of math problems, it was just sitting down and doing the task at hand,” Power-Greene says. “Where this is really coaching, as we go along, with a bigger vision of connecting to larger skills.”

Executive function coaching is a relatively new development in education — bolstered by a growing interest in neuroscience and the brain’s pre-frontal cortex, where executive functions are thought to originate.

Michael Delman, a former principal who founded Beyond Booksmart, says his company offered this kind of generalized academic help for a couple years before he knew there was a name for it.

He remembers an office mate saw an article in 2008, “and she said, you need to call this executive function coaching. That’s what you’re doing,” he says. “And I thought – is that a bit presumptuous? or does it really fit?”

Delman now oversees about 100 coaches, who he says go through rigorous training that includes a lesson in neuroscience. His company is among at least a dozen in Massachusetts that offer executive function coaching — and many more nationwide, though no association keeps track. Nor is there any regulation of the field, so there’s a wide range in coach backgrounds and what they do.

“She did a lot of acronyms. I don’t remember most of them,” says high school sophomore Peter Curran, who got an executive function coach last year when his grades started to drop.

He says it helped at first — mostly because the coach showed him how to download software that helped him organize his assignments and study for tests. But by the end of the year, Peter decided he’d be better off with a traditional tutor and more time to study for specific classes.

“I felt like she didn’t really help me anymore,” he says. “It just felt like it was a tedious thing to do and kind of wasted my time.”

Peter’s mother, Karen Curran, says coaching did help Peter acclimate to the high school juggling act – but she’s not sure he got the brain-boosting benefits they were expecting.

“Well, first of all, it’s extremely expensive,” says Curran.

She says she paid about $1800 a month, which included time the coach spent driving to their home, and checking in by text or email between sessions.

While traditional tutors generally charge from $20 to about $75 an hour, Michael Delman says his company charges up to 180 dollars an hour.

“Generally we tell parents to expect it’s going to cost $5,000 or $6,000 that they’re gonna be investing so their child is going to be effective in high school, in college, and so forth,” Delman says.

“We should be cautious before we invest a lot of money in such interventions, before we really have the solid evidence base to show that it works,” says Robin Jacob.

Jacob is an education researcher at the University of Michigan who recently published an overview of 67 studies on executive function coaching.

She says while there was a connection between executive function skills and academic achievement, the studies did not show that working on those skills leads to achievement.

“I was surprised by the findings and the lack of evidence that’s out there,” Jacob says, “because it is so very intuitively appealing.”

She says skilled tutoring in math or English might actually improve someone’s executive functions more than the other way around.

“We’re always looking for the panacea,” Jacob says, “and we move from fad to fad. I feel like executive function is sort of the fad of the day.”

Michael Delman of Beyond Booksmart takes issue with Jacob’s study; he says she defined achievement too narrowly. And he says students with learning disabilities – who were excluded from her study – can benefit the most from his company’s coaching.

However, Delman concedes the brain-training industry does promise some results even he doesn’t believe.

“They’re advertised very heavily,” he says.  “You know, ‘Make your brain faster and smarter!’ We haven’t found those things to be particularly effective.”

Some researchers have questioned whether kids are actually honing their executive functions if it’s mostly the coaches coming up with work plans.

Lilli Stordeur says her habits and organization have improved since working with a coach, but it’s not just about the skills she’s learning. It’s also the one-on-one contact.

“I think having the routine of meeting once a week is helpful to know that I have a point in the week where I stop what I’m doing and kind of figure out if I’m on the right track,” she says.

That’s something many educators and psychologists say can come from less expensive forms of help — or, ideally, for free in the public schools.

PART TWO: A company’s promise to balance the brain’s hemispheres sparks skepticism.