STUDY PROTOCOL article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Educational Psychology
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1574860
PROTOCOL: The On Track 2.0 Cluster Randomised Teacher-led Intervention to Support Executive Function and Self-Regulation
Provisionally accepted
- University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark
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The top-down cognitive and emotional control skills known as Executive Function (EF) and Self-Regulation (SR) have a large impact on everyday life. As a schoolchild, you are expected to pay attention, wait your turn, follow instructions, solve academic problems and be creative while navigating the social space of peers and teachers. All these abilities draw on EF and SR. Research has pointed to curricular programs as a promising path to build capacity in schoolteachers and provide with further knowledge on ways to support and strengthen these EF and SR skills in their pupils through activities, strategies and reflection tasks. The importance of EF and SR on later life outcomes such as academic performance, career, relationships and risk of crime, has been a motivating factor to develop the 10-session On Track 2.0 intervention as a universal wholeclass approach to improve EF and SR in primary school pupils.Methods: Regular 4th and 5th grade class groups will be invited to participate in this teacherdelivered intervention program to be implemented into regular lessons. In this study schools will be randomly assigned to either intervention or control group as part of a cluster-randomised controlled trial. Psychometric and questionnaire assessing EF, SR and well-being will be administered to children, teachers and parents at three time points.The intervention holds the potential to support and qualify teachers in understanding students' challenges with EF and SR better and in training these skills during class. A multimodal and multi-informant approach to assessment, in addition to data on teacher adherence and platform use, will aid the insight into the efficacy of the intervention content and delivery.The study has been registered at Open Science Framework on
Keywords: Executive Function, Self-regulation, Curriculum-based intervention, Primary education, Children, Well-being
Received: 11 Feb 2025; Accepted: 30 May 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Kristensen, Blurton and Vangkilde. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Anne Marie Kristensen, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.