Improving junior high students’ thinking and creative abilities with an executive function training program

Executive functions (EFs) are closely related to thinking and creativity. Recent studies that trained the elderly and other adults by reading aloud and performing arithmetic calculations show their ability to enhance EFs. The present study adopts this program with a self-designed application system on adolescents whose EF capabilities are in a period of extreme development and explores its meta-transfer effects to improve adolescents’ thinking and creative abilities. Thirty-eight junior high students were randomly assigned to the training and the active control group. After completing pretests on EFs, thinking, and creativity, the training group proceeded with reading aloud and arithmetic calculation activities, while the control group played the game Tetris for 20 15-min sessions. The ANCOVAs on the posttest performance indicated that the participants in the training group outperformed their control group peers on the thinking and creativity measures. These results demonstrate the trainability and easy application of the program and its effectiveness on improving adolescents’ higher cognition.