Executive function (EF) refers to the cognitive skills used to plan, organize, initiate, and complete activities. Success in school depends on intact EF skills, particularly as a student advances into higher grades. This program gives SLPs practical strategies to assess executive function skills in children and adolescents (aged 6–22), and interventions to support the development of situational awareness, goal selection, task management and planning, time management, and organized thinking. Topics include self-regulation and situational awareness, forethought and hindsight, episodic and working memory, declarative language and self-talk, organization and planning, and higher-order thinking and reasoning.

Learning Outcomes
You will be able to:

• give the functional definition of “executive function skills” as it pertains to therapeutic interventions
• discuss how situational awareness, forethought, and episodic memory are foundational skills for successful task execution
• list standardized tests that assess underlying skills for task execution and describe informal measures for assessing EF skills in children and adolescents
• develop an intervention program to foster a child’s ability to form more independent executive function skills
• outline how the SLP can collaborate with parents, teachers, and other professionals to implement an executive function based treatment program both in and outside the classroom