Developing and Implementing an Educational Package for Training Executive Functions and Examining its Effectiveness on underachiever pupil's Academic Achievement

The purpose of this research was to developing of an educational Package for training executive functions and examining its effectiveness on academic achievement of third-grade underachiever pupils. The research method was experimental with pre -test and post-test and follow up with the control group. The educational software package included 10 games and also 10 games with pencil-paper content.Educational training for executive functions, attention, working memory, inhibition, organizing and planning was prepared. For any executive function, 2 educational game pencil-paper and 2 software game were considered. In order to investigate the effectof the training package on academic achievement of 34 underachiever pupils from elementary school to pick random sampling method and were randomly divided into two experimental and control groups. The experimental group was trained for 20 sessions. The data were analyzed using variance with repeated measures and analysis of covariance. The results showed that training package of executive functions could be effective in improving academic achievement of the subjects. The improvement in the subject of reading, spelling, and math was the least improvement, seen in reading comprehension. By controlling the age and intelligence, executive function of the impact of the intervention on reading comprehension decreased, so that there was no significant statistical difference between the average reading comprehension test of experimental and control groups. Thus, it can be concluded that training package designed for executive functions could improve student achievement in lessons on reading, spelling and math are effective and lead to decreased academic distance between normal and underachiever students.