Executive Function and Study Skills in the IB: AGIS 2026 Insights
During a full-day workshop at the AGIS Conference 2026 in Potsdam, Dr Reece Wartenberg, (Founding Director at LearnFire) , shared practical strategies for the explicit teaching of Executive Function (EF) and study skills for IB students.
Teachers, school leaders, and working group members joined the interactive session.
This Q&A highlights key takeaways from his presentation, the underlying research, and actionable steps for families and schools.
What is Executive Function & Study Skills and Why Do IB Students Need It?
Executive function and study skills give IB students practical ways to manage their academic workload to plan, organise their work, manage their time, and regulate their attention. Educators should explicitly teach these skills, and students must practise them until they use them independently.
Key Takeaways
Executive function supports academic learning.
Study skills turn these abilities into practical strategies.
IB students need explicit teaching of these skills.
Effective study methods improve how students prepare and revise.
The goal is greater student independence.
Our research shows two things: early preparation leads to higher grades, and the best way to sustain it is making academic consistency a natural part of a student's daily routine. ~ Reece Wartenberg, founder of LearnFire and study skills coach
Q1. What is Executive Function, and why did the workshop treat it as the foundation of study skills?
Executive Function (EF) covers planning, goal-setting, working memory, flexible thinking and self-regulation. These abilities shape how students approach academic work and respond to challenges.
Study skills put these abilities into practice. Students use them to organise notes, manage time, prioritise tasks, retain information and prepare for examinations.
Research supports this connection. In their 2005 study, Self-Discipline Outdoes IQ in Predicting Academic Performance of Adolescents, Angela Duckworth and Martin Seligman found that self-discipline predicted academic outcomes in eighth-graders. In their replication sample, it accounted for more than twice as much variance in final grades as IQ.
The Education Endowment Foundation's research on metacognition and self-regulation estimates an average of eight additional months of progress associated with these approaches.
Executive Function develops throughout life. Early support matters, and teenagers can still make meaningful gains.
For schools, the implication is clear. Students need opportunities to practise managing their learning. We should teach them how to plan, monitor their progress and adjust their approach when something isn't working.
"We can teach these skills" ~Reece Wartenberg
Q2. Which EF and study skill challenges do you see most often in IB students?
Students often struggle to see the full picture of their academic workload. Coursework deadlines, mock examinations, Internal Assessments, the Extended Essay and final examinations compete for their time.
Without a clear plan, students struggle to decide what needs attention first. Goals become vague, revision starts too late, and daily work loses its connection to longer-term targets.
Organisation also matters.
Some students have notes spread across folders, notebooks and digital platforms. They struggle to find the information they need when they begin revising.
The quality of revision is another concern. Students may spend hours highlighting or rereading material without checking whether they can recall or apply it.
Research by Dunlosky and colleagues, published in Improving Students' Learning With Effective Learning Techniques, examined ten common techniques. Practice testing and distributed practice received high-utility ratings. Highlighting and rereading received low-utility ratings.
Students also need to protect their downtime. Prolonged work without proper breaks makes demanding schedules harder to sustain. Procrastination follows when students struggle to manage the emotions associated with difficult tasks.
We must also address AI. Students need clear guidance on using it responsibly while retaining ownership of their learning.
Q3. Why teach these skills explicitly instead of expecting students to pick them up?
By Grade 9 or Year 10, academic demands have increased considerably. Students need practical methods for preparing for assessments, managing deadlines and revising across several subjects.
Students do not always receive systematic instruction in these skills. We expect independence without consistently teaching the processes that support it.
I see a gap between recognising the importance of Executive Function and putting it into practice across the school years.
At LearnFire, we integrate EF principles into study skills coaching. We build resources with each student and adapt them to the student's subjects, workload and working preferences.
This gives students a voice in the process. They understand why a strategy matters and have a say in how they use it.
That ownership is important, particularly with teenagers. When a student recognises a difficulty and asks for support, the conversation with parents changes. The student has a reason to engage with the process.
Our goal is to develop strategies students can use independently. Coaching should give them a system they understand, adapt and continue to use as academic demands increase.
Q4. You argue goal-setting gets too much attention and goal management too little. What does that mean in practice?
Setting a goal is only the beginning. Students need to track progress and reflect on their results.
At LearnFire, students record goals for individual IB subjects, the Extended Essay and Theory of Knowledge (TOK).
Students check their progress during each term and after mock exams to see how their results compare with their academic goals and the IB Diploma Programme’s maximum 45-point score.
Each checkpoint creates questions:
What worked?
Where did I lose marks?
Did the revision method suit the assessment?
Was the schedule realistic?
What needs to change?
A missed goal can identify a gap in knowledge, an ineffective study method or a planning problem. Meeting a goal provides evidence about repeatable approaches.
In their 35-year review of goal-setting research, Edwin Locke and Gary Latham examined how specific, challenging goals influence performance. Their work supports setting goals that stretch students and provide a clear direction.
However, goals must remain realistic for each student's circumstances. Every goal needs a practical plan, regular checkpoints and a willingness to adjust if what you do right now is not working.
Goal management turns an ambition into a process students can follow and evaluate.
Q5. How does the Ideal Week work, and what should students do on breaks?
The Ideal Week gives students a practical way to organise their workload before deadlines create pressure and panic.
Students build a weekly timetable that includes lessons, activities, free time and between 10 and 16 focused work sessions. These sessions cover homework, preparation for upcoming assessments and revision of material that hasn't been tested yet.
They choose between two formats:
45 minutes of work followed by a 15-minute break.
25 minutes of work followed by a five-minute break, repeated twice.
The schedule should reflect the student's commitments. A plan that ignores sport, family time, travel or rest won't last.
Breaks also need attention. I recommend stepping away from reading, videos, social media and gaming. These activities create information overload and make it difficult to return to their desk to continue the work on time.
Procrastination is closely connected to how we manage difficult feelings. In their 2013 paper on procrastination and short-term mood regulation, Fuschia Sirois and Timothy Pychyl explored how people delay tasks to manage immediate discomfort.
This helps explain why knowing what to do doesn't always lead to action. A student might understand the importance of revision but still avoid starting a difficult task.
Scheduling creates a starting point. Managing attention, emotions and breaks helps students follow through.
Q6. What are the Three Steps to Exam Success?
The Three Steps to Exam Success give students a repeatable process to prepare for examinations: summarise, memorise and apply their knowledge.
Step 1: Summarise Students organise their notes and condense material into clear mind maps. This requires them to identify key concepts, relationships and supporting details.
A mind map should represent understanding. Copying entire paragraphs into a diagram defeats the purpose.
Step 2: Memorise They use suitable methods to retain the information they need. Different content requires different approaches, so we teach three layers of memorisation rather than relying on one technique.
Students also need to revisit material over time. Cramming may create short-term familiarity, but it leaves less opportunity to strengthen long-term retention.
Step 3: Apply Students use their knowledge to answer questions, solve problems and explain concepts without relying on their notes.
This step is required. They must practise the type of thinking their examinations demand.
A Physics student needs to solve unfamiliar problems.
An English student needs to analyse text and construct an argument. Each subject requires its own application strategies.
Research supports this approach. In their 2006 study of test-enhanced learning, Henry Roediger and Jeffrey Karpicke found that retrieval practice improved delayed retention compared with repeated studying.
A review by Cepeda and colleagues synthesised 317 experiments and found strong evidence for distributed practice. Students benefit from spreading study sessions over time.
The individual techniques matter, but so does having a clear system.
You need to know what to do, when to do it and how to check whether the preparation is working. And adjust the process if it does not work.
Q7. How should students use AI while studying?
Students need to understand when AI supports learning and when it takes over the thinking they need to practise.
The 2026 HEPI Student Generative AI Survey reports that 95% of UK undergraduates used AI in at least one way. AI literacy belongs in discussions about academic preparation. We cannot ignore it and hope it goes away.
I see value in using AI to generate practice questions, quiz students on a topic or identify possible gaps in a mind map. Prompting AI also helps to explain difficult concepts in a clear and relatable way.
Compare AI answers against reliable sources and course materials. We all know that AI sometimes produces convincing explanations that contain errors just to discover that it is not factually correct.
Students should do the summarising, reasoning and final thinking themselves. Asking AI to write an assignment or produce revision notes they never examine removes the opportunity to practise those skills.
Schools need clear guidance on acceptable AI use. The schools should also educate and explain the academic integrity requirements and how to acknowledge AI assistance where required.
We aim is to develop students who can use these tools thoughtfully, check the information they receive and accept responsibility for their work.
Q8. How does this connect to the IB's ATL skills and Learner Profile?
The IB's Approaches to Learning (ATL) framework provides a useful connection to Executive Function and study skills.
ATL skills include thinking, communication, research, social and self-management skills. Self-management is relevant to planning, organisation, time management and managing emotions.
Students practise these skills when they build an Ideal Week, track subject goals and review their results after mock exams. They learn to monitor their progress and adjust their approach.
The IB Learner Profile offers useful reference points:
Reflect: Review what worked and what needs to change.
Balance: Make time for schoolwork, rest and other responsibilities.
Principled: Use AI responsibly and follow academic integrity rules.
These connections need to appear in students' daily work. A school can describe independence as an educational aim, but students need opportunities to practise it.
Explicit teaching gives students a way to develop these habits across subjects. Teachers model the process, guide practice and gradually give students greater responsibility.
The result we want is greater independence, informed by reflection and supported by practical strategies.
Q9. What comes next?
The discussions at AGIS 2026 raised an important question for international schools:
How do we make Executive Function and study skills a more consistent part of students' education?
One proposal was to establish a European EF and Study Skills Working Group. The group could bring educators together to share practice, examine evidence and develop resources for international schools.
Possible first-year outputs include an AGIS newsletter, a white paper or a co-authored journal article. A focused initial group would allow participants to identify priorities and agree on practical next steps.
I would like to see this conversation reach more school leaders and education teams. School leaders need to decide how these skills fit within their academic support provision, teacher development and student wellbeing programmes.
LearnFire works with students through individual academic coaching, with experienced career teachers matched to each student's needs. We also see an opportunity to work with schools that want a more structured approach to Executive Function and study skills.
We invite school Leaders to contact LearnFire to discuss a coaching partnership or how we can collaborate with the proposed working group. Teachers interested in becoming study skills and EF coaches are also welcome to express their interest.
We also invite parents to book an assessment to identify their child's needs, develop a practical support plan and match them with an experienced career teacher who explicitly teaches the executive functioning and study skills they need.
In conclusion, students need subject knowledge, effective study methods and the ability to manage their own learning. Schools that teach all three give students a stronger foundation for independent academic work.
These skills will serve them throughout school, university and their working lives.
About Dr Reece Wartenberg (Founder)
Dr. Reece Wartenberg is the Founder of LearnFire. With a Doctorate in Biology and Chemistry from the City University of Hong Kong, he replaces traditional tutoring with disciplined academic roadmaps. Reece empowers students to refine their unique reasoning to excel at the world’s most demanding universities.
