Executive Function and Self-Regulation 

in 

Middle School Students

Grade 6

Executive Function and Self Regulation in Middle School Students

Have you ever wondered how different people prioritize different things. Well this is called “Executive Function and Self regulation,” the skills that enable us to organize our lives.  Everyone relies on Executive Function and Self Regulation skills to get through everyday life so, the research is to figure out what people thought about it.  Also, something this important in our lives should be studied.  The research question was: Are the Executive Function and Self Regulation skills of a middle school student affected by gender? And the hypothesis was: The Executive Function and Self  Regulatory skills of a middle school student is not affected by the  gender that the student is, because every person is different.  After choosing the question the next goal was to collect some data.  The first step was to create surveys for, parents, experts, and students.  The surveys were sent out to students through randomly selected home rooms, 5 out of 6 of the student home rooms responded, giving me 92 total responses.   However the research had some errors for example, one of the questions referring to ‘exercising control over themselves’ was sometime mistaken as ability to play sports, rather than, behavioral situations.  Also, some of the answers were completely unrelated, like how someone put “potato” as an answer to a boy/girl question.  To finalize the findings I analyzed my data from students and parents.  My student survey was taken by 47 boys and 47 girls; my parent survey as taken by 27 parent.  The results from my student survey were not every shocking, many students put the same things down on the survey.  Out of all the respondents only 6 said they had ADD, ADHD or EFD, 66.7% of that group had ADHD and only 33.3% had ADD. The data also, showed that 82.7% of the respondents vault family above all else, followed by school at 48%.  The top 3 things that people said were their weakest point was Time management (23%), organizing (20.6%), and achieving goals, controlling emotions and remembering instructions tied at (12.4%).  The last question was proved statistically significant by the chi square test which resulting in saying boys had more trouble exercising controlling themselves.  The parent survey was taken by sending out an email to most of the parents around school.  The parent survey included questions about their children and I uses this information to compare the answer of a parent to the answers of. Middle school student.  51.9% of the parents that responded were parents of boys and 48% of the parents were parent of girls.  70.4% answered that their children did not have ADHD, ADD or EFD.  In conclusion the results of my survey shows that most people (even some boys) think that boys actually have a harder time exercising controlling themselves.