Assessing Executive Functions in Young Children

Abstract

The assessment of typical and atypical executive functioning in young children is important to clinicians, researchers, and educators interested in understanding children’s emerging emotion regulation, social development, and academic achievement. This chapter provides a comparison of unitary and component views of the executive system in early childhood, and how standardized and commercially available performance-based measures of working memory, response inhibition, set-shifting, and planning can be used to assess children’s capacity to access this executive system. The measures reviewed contain age norms and therefore, have importance for clinical practice. The authors also review challenges to assessment of executive functions in young children with and without disabilities and offers recommendations for selecting measures and interpreting assessment results.