Contextual Considerations & Practical Guidelines for Direct Assessments of Children's Executive Function Skills

The main objective of this document is to foster greater research capacity to assess executive function (EF) skills in children ages 3-12 around the globe, and especially in low-resource settings. These guidelines are general recommendations based on the Global Executive Function Initiative’s (GEFI) members’ collective experience conducting EF assessments in diverse cultures and contexts. We compiled recommended practices for selection, adaptation, and administration of EF performance-based tasks and for processing, evaluating, reporting, and interpreting data that these tasks yield. While we derive these recommendations from our work using existing EF tasks, these recommendations can be used to guide the design and testing of novel EF tasks. We hope this resource will help researchers conduct more psychometrically rigorous and ecologically valid assessments of children’s EF skills, expanding scientific understanding of these skills across different cultures and contexts. Although we considered a wide range of situations, this guide does not provide an exhaustive review of all issues. We acknowledge there is not always consensus about best practices. While we hope this resource eases the way for researchers who wish to incorporate and administer EF tasks into their studies, it is not a prescriptive blueprint. Researchers are ultimately responsible for making choices that best fit their specific study design, cultural context, and available resources.