单选题 Most people can recall a kid from grade school who couldn"t stay seated, who talked out of turn and fidgeted constantly, and who always had to ask other kids what the homework assignment was. This kind of student has been tagged with a variety of labels over the years: antisocial personality, conduct disorder, stupid. But recent advances in psychology and brain science are now suggesting that a child"s ability to inhibit distracting thoughts and stay focused may be a fundamental cognitive skill, one that plays a big part in academic success from preschool on.
The scientific name for this set of skills is "executive function," or EF. It"s an emerging concept in student assessment and could eventually displace traditional measures of ability and achievement. EF comprises not only effortful control and cognitive focus but also working memory and mental flexibility—the ability to adjust to change, to think outside the box. These are the uniquely human skills that, taken together, allow us keep our more impulsive and distractible brain in check. New research shows that EF, more than IQ, leads to success in basic academics like arithmetic and grammar. It also suggests that we can pump up these EF skills with regular exercise, just as we do with muscles.
Psychologist Adele Diamond of the University of British Columbia has been testing the EF concept in the classroom, with provocative results. In one recent study Diamond convinced a large low-income urban school district to let her experiment with its preschoolers. Half the classrooms, involving hundreds of children, adopted a new curriculum specifically designed to boost EF, while the other half used a more traditional academic curriculum aimed at basic literacy.
The EF curriculum has many strands, but here is one example just to give a flavor. Instead of keeping the classroom quiet, kids are actually taught and encouraged to talk to themselves, privately but aloud, as a way of helping them exert mental control. In one exercise, for example, the kids have to match their movements to symbols. When the teacher holds up a circle they clap, with a triangle they hop, and so forth. The kids are taught to talk themselves through the mental exercise. "OK, now clap." "Twirl now." This has been shown to flex and enhance the brain"s ability to switch gears, to suppress one piece of information and sub in a new one. It takes discipline; it"s the elementary school equivalent of saying "I really need stop thinking about next week"s vacation and focus on this report."
This is a vast oversimplification of a curriculum that has taken years to develop and is grounded in rigorous scientific studies of children"s brain development. The EF tests were very difficult cognitive challenges that require kids to inhibit their automatic responses. The EF-trained children outperformed the traditionally educated kids on every single test. In fact, the differences were so dramatic after one year that some school officials opted out of the experiment to give all the kids the benefit of EF training.

单选题 Executive function refers to ______

单选题 One of the characteristics of EF is that ______

单选题 The activities mentioned in the third paragraph are meant to ______

单选题 Why did some school officials stop carrying on the experiment?

单选题 It can be inferred from the passage that EF differs from IQ in that the former ______