Return to References: Cognitive Flexibility factor page.
Numerous measures exist to gain a full picture of a student's learning strengths and challenges. Following are examples of measures used to assess this Learner Factor. These measures should be administered and interpreted by experienced professionals.
Dimensional Change Card Sort task: (DCCs; Zelazo, 2006): Learners sort picture cards according to one dimension or rule, such as by color,and then according to another rule, such as by shape.
Wisconsin Card Sorting Task: (WCST; Miles et al., 2021): Learners sort picture cards according to three shifting dimensions or rules: color, shape, and number.
Trail Making Test (part B): (Bowie & Harvey, 2006): Measures Cognitive Flexibility by requiring students to connect/draw a line between labeled points on a sheet of paper according to a rule of alternating between numbers and letter (e.g. 1-> A->2->B->3->C…)
Baddeley, A. (1996). Exploring the central executive. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology Section A, 49(1), 5-28.
Bauer, P. J., & Zelazo, P., D. (2014). The National Institutes of Health Toolbox for the Assessment of Neurological and Behavioral Function: A Tool for Developmental Science. Child Development Perspectives, 8, 119–24.
Best, J. R., Miller, P. H., & Naglieri, J. A. (2011). Relations between executive function and academic achievement from ages 5 to 17 in a large, representative national sample. Learning and Individual Differences, 21(4), 327–336.
Bialystok, E. (2011). Global-Local and Trail-Making Tasks by monolingual and bilingual children: Beyond Inhibition. Developmental Psychology, 46(1), 93–105.
Blair, C., & Razza, R. P. (2007). Relating effortful control, executive function, and false belief understanding to emerging math and literacy ability in kindergarten. Child Development, 78(2), 647-663.
Bonino, S., & Cattelino, E. (1999). The relationship between cognitive abilities and social abilities in childhood: A research on flexibility in thinking and co-operation with peers. International Journal of Behavioral Development, 23(1), 19-36.
Bowie, C., Harvey, P. D. (2006). Administration and interpretation of Trail Making Test. Nature Protocols, 1(5), 2277–2281.
Caetano, L. A. O., de Oliveira, W. A., do Nascimento, L. C. G., Manochio-Pina, M. G., Ramos, S. B., & da Silva, J. L. (2021). Relationship between executive functions and bullying: an integrative literature review. Psicologia: teoria e prática, 23(2), 1-23.
Cancela, J., Burgo, H., & Sande, E. (2019). Physical fitness and executive functions in adolescents: cross-sectional associations with academic achievement. Journal of Physical Therapy science, 31(7), 556-562.
Cepeda, N. J., Cepeda, M. L., & Kramer, A. F. (2000). Task switching and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology, 28(3), 213–226.
Christoffels, I. K., Haan, A. M. De, & Colzato, L. S. (2015). Two is better than one: Bilingual education promotes the flexible mind. Psychological Research, 79, 371–379.
Ciairano, S., Bonino, S., & Miceli, R. (2006). Cognitive flexibility and social competence from childhood to early adolescence. Cognitie, Creier, Comportament/Cognition, Brain, Behavior, 10(3).
Clark, D., Schumann, F., & Mostofsky, S. H. (2015). Mindful movement and skilled attention. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 9, 297.
Darby, K. P., Castro, L., Wasserman, E. A., & Sloutsky, V. M. (2018). Cognitive flexibility and memory in pigeons, human children, and adults. Cognition, 177, 30-40.
De Lillo, M., & Ferguson, H. J. (2023). Perspective-taking and social inferences in adolescents, young adults, and older adults. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.
Feng, X., Perceval, G. J., Feng, W., & Feng, C. (2020). High cognitive flexibility learners perform better in probabilistic rule learning. Frontiers in Psychology, 11, 415.
Gopnik, A., O'Grady, S., Lucas, C. G., Griffiths, T. L., Wente, A., Bridgers, S., & Dahl, R. E. (2017). Changes in cognitive flexibility and hypothesis search across human life history from childhood to adolescence to adulthood. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 114(30), 7892-7899.
Hofmann, W., Schmeichel, B. J., & Baddeley, A. D. (2012). Executive functions and self-regulation. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 16(3), 174-180
Honoré, N., Houssa, M., Volckaert, A., Noël, M. P., & Nader-Grosbois, N. (2020). Training inhibition and social cognition in the classrooms. Frontiers in Psychology, 11, 1974.
Kleibeuker, S. W., Koolschijn, P. C. M., Jolles, D. D., De Dreu, C. K., & Crone, E. A. (2013). The neural coding of creative idea generation across adolescence and early adulthood. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 7, 905.
Lee, D. B., Assari, S., Miller, A. L., Hsieh, H. F., Heinze, J. E., & Zimmerman, M. A. (2019). Positive parenting moderates the effect of socioeconomic status on executive functioning: a three-generation approach. Journal of Child and Family Studies, 28, 1878-1885.
Legare, C. H., Dale, M. T., Kim, S. Y., & Deak, G. O. (2018). Cultural variation in cognitive flexibility reveals diversity in the development of executive functions. Scientific Reports, 8, 16326.
Li, J., Wang, W., Cheng, J., Li, H., Feng, L., Ren, Y., ... & Wang, Y. (2022). Relationships between sensory integration and the core symptoms of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder: the mediating effect of executive function. European Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, 1-12.
Liu, S., Yu, Q., Li, Z., Cunha, P. M., Zhang, Y., Kong, Z., ... & Cai, Y. (2020). Effects of acute and chronic exercises on executive function in children and adolescents: a systemic review and meta-analysis. Frontiers in Psychology, 11, 554915.
Long, M. R., Horton, W. S., Rohde, H., & Sorace, A. (2018). Individual differences in switching and inhibition predict perspective-taking across the lifespan. Cognition, 170, 25-30.
Malinowski, P. (2013). Neural mechanisms of attentional control in mindfulness meditation. Frontiers in Neuroscience,7, 1–11.
Matthews, J. S., Banerjee, M., & Lauermann, F. (2014). Academic identity formation and motivation among ethnic minority adolescents: The role of the “self” between internal and external perceptions of identity. Child Development, 85(6), 2355-2373.
Matthews, J. S. (2018). When am I ever going to use this in the real world? Cognitive flexibility and urban adolescents' negotiation of the value of mathematics. Journal of Educational Psychology, 110(5), 726–746.
Miles, S., Howlett, C. A., Berryman, C., Nedeljkovic, M., Moseley, G. L., & Phillipou, A. (2021). Considerations for using the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test to assess cognitive flexibility. Behavior Research Methods, 53(5), 2083-2091.
Nweze, T., & Nwani, W. (2020). Contributions of working memory and inhibition to cognitive flexibility in Nigerian adolescents. Developmental Neuropsychology, 45(3), 118-128.
Peters, S., & Crone, E. (2014). Cognitive flexibility in childhood and adolescence. Task Switching and Cognitive Control, 332-349.
Preiss, D. D. (2022). Metacognition, mind wandering, and cognitive flexibility: Understanding creativity. Journal of Intelligence, 10(3), 69.
Rodriguez-Gomez, D. A., & Talero-Gutiérrez, C. (2022). Effects of music training in executive function performance in children: A systematic review. Frontiers in Psychology, 13, 968144.
Sibley, M. H., Graziano, P. A., Ortiz, M., Rodriguez, L., & Coxe, S. (2019). Academic impairment among high school students with ADHD: The role of motivation and goal-directed executive functions. Journal of School Psychology, 77, 67-76.
Spann, M. N., Mayes, L. C., Kalmar, J. H., Guiney, J., Womer, F. Y., Pittman, B., ... & Blumberg, H. P. (2012). Childhood abuse and neglect and cognitive flexibility in adolescents. Child Neuropsychology, 18(2), 182-189.
Spiegler, O., & Leyendecker, B. (2017). Balanced cultural identities promote cognitive flexibility among immigrant children. Frontiers in Psychology, 8, 1579.
Tamm, L., Menon, V., Ringel, J., & Reiss, A. L. (2004). Event-related FMRI evidence of frontotemporal involvement in aberrant response inhibition and task switching in attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, 43(11), 1430-1440.
Theodoraki, T. E., McGeown, S. P., Rhodes, S. M., & MacPherson, S. E. (2020). Developmental changes in executive functions during adolescence: A study of inhibition, shifting, and working memory. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 38(1), 74-89.
Voica, C., & Singer, F. M. (2013). Problem modification as a tool for detecting cognitive flexibility in school children. ZDM, 45, 267-279.
Zelazo, P. D. (2006). The Dimensional Change Card Sort (DCCS): A method of assessing executive function in children. Nature Protocols, 1(1), 297-301.
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