Japanese Teachers Can Now Screen Kids’ Executive Function Before School Starts

Executive function — the mental machinery that lets a child hold information in mind, resist impulses, and manage their own behavior — has become one of the most closely watched predictors of how well children fare once they walk through the school gates. Decades of research have linked these cognitive skills to academic achievement, peer relationships, and long-term life outcomes, and children whose executive function lags behind their peers often struggle in the classroom in ways that are hard to untangle later. A new study from Japan now gives teachers in that country a validated tool for spotting which five- and six-year-olds may need extra support before formal schooling even begins.

The research, published in Current Psychology by Kyoko Imai-Matsumura of Hyogo University of Teacher Education, centers on a Japanese adaptation of the Childhood Executive Functioning Inventory, or CHEXI — a brief rating instrument originally developed in Sweden by Lisa Thorell and colleagues. The CHEXI asks adults who know the child well, typically parents or teachers, to rate everyday behaviors that reflect two core executive function components: working memory, the capacity to keep and manipulate information over short periods, and inhibition, the ability to stop or suppress inappropriate impulses. Unlike laboratory tasks, which are time-consuming to administer and can be stressful for young children, a teacher-completed questionnaire can screen an entire classroom quickly and in a setting where the child’s everyday self-regulation is on display.

Why does this matter for Japan specifically? Executive function is widely regarded as a cornerstone of school readiness, and international studies have shown that children with weak executive function at school entry are at elevated risk of academic difficulties and attention problems years later. If educators can identify children with low executive function at the moment of school enrolment, they can put supports in place early — a window in which interventions, from structured games to targeted training programs, have shown the most promise. But a rating scale only works if it has been properly validated in the language and culture in which it will be used, and until now Japanese educators lacked a teacher-rated version with solid psychometric credentials.

To build one, Imai-Matsumura translated and adapted the CHEXI for Japanese use and then put it through a rigorous validation study with a group of children in the year before elementary school entry. The sample comprised 152 children — 77 boys, making up 51 percent, and 75 girls, or 49 percent — with a mean age of just over 71 months, or roughly five years and eleven months. Homeroom teachers, the adults best positioned to observe children’s day-to-day self-regulation in a group setting, completed the ratings.

The first question was structural: does the Japanese questionnaire measure the same two things — working memory and inhibition — that the CHEXI captures in other countries? To answer it, the study used confirmatory factor analysis, a statistical technique that tests whether a hypothesized set of underlying factors actually explains the pattern of responses. The two-factor model fit the Japanese data well, with a chi-square to degrees-of-freedom ratio of 1.760, a root mean square error of approximation of 0.071, and a comparative fit index of 0.967 — values that fall within or near conventional benchmarks for good model fit. In plain terms, the same two-dimensional architecture that has emerged in Swedish, Spanish, Italian, Iranian, Kenyan, and other adaptations of the CHEXI held up in Japanese classrooms too.

Structure alone is not enough, however; a scale also has to mean something. To establish validity, the study examined whether teachers’ ratings on the Japanese CHEXI correlated with children’s performance on direct, task-based measures of executive function. They did: both the working memory and inhibition scores from the teacher ratings were significantly associated with the children’s scores on performance-based assessments. This convergence between what teachers observe in the classroom and what children actually do on cognitive tasks is exactly the kind of evidence that gives a screening tool practical credibility.

The third pillar of the validation was stability over time. Four months after the first assessment, the homeroom teachers administered the CHEXI a second time, and the study then examined how closely the two rounds of ratings agreed. The correlation coefficients and the intraclass correlation coefficients — a statistic that captures absolute agreement rather than mere association — all exceeded 0.9 for working memory, inhibition, and overall executive function. Ratings that hold that steady across a four-month span in growing five- and six-year-olds suggest the instrument is measuring a stable trait rather than a teacher’s passing impression of a child’s mood on a given day.

Taken together, the findings position the Japanese CHEXI as an effective measure of working memory and inhibition in five- to six-year-old Japanese children, and — crucially for practice — as a feasible screening instrument at the point of school enrolment. The study joins a rapidly expanding international literature: the CHEXI has now been validated in more than a dozen languages and countries, including Saudi Arabia, Hungary, Spain, Argentina, Turkey, Iran, Italy, Portugal, and Russia, with cross-cultural work showing that teacher and parent ratings of executive function relate to academic achievement across very different educational systems. The Japanese adaptation extends that map to East Asia and to a country whose early-childhood educators have been actively searching for practical readiness-assessment tools.

The research also carries broader significance for the science of self-regulation. Large longitudinal studies have demonstrated that childhood self-control predicts adult health, wealth, and public safety, and that executive function deficits are a common thread running through attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, learning disabilities, and academic underachievement. Screening at school entry cannot by itself change a child’s trajectory, but it opens the door to early intervention at the age when the brain’s executive circuits are most malleable and when programs targeting self-regulation have produced their most durable gains. A one-page teacher questionnaire that reliably flags children who need help is a small instrument with potentially large consequences.

The study was supported by a Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, and the author reports no competing interests. Data from the validation study are included in the published article, and the work received ethical approval and informed consent from the families and schools involved. For Japanese kindergartens and elementary schools preparing to welcome their next cohort of five-year-olds, the message of the research is straightforward: the teachers who already watch these children every day can now turn those observations into a reliable, internationally benchmarked measure of the executive skills that school success is built on.

Subject of Research: Validation of a Japanese teacher-rated executive function screening scale for preschool children

Article Title: Reliability and validity of the teacher-rated Japanese version of the Childhood Executive Functioning Inventory (CHEXI) in pre–elementary school children

Article References: Imai-Matsumura, K. (2026). Reliability and validity of the teacher-rated Japanese version of the Childhood Executive Functioning Inventory (CHEXI) in pre–elementary school children. Current Psychology, 45(20), Article 1620. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-026-10182-w

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12144-026-10182-w

Keywords: executive function, CHEXI, working memory, inhibition, school readiness, psychometric validation, early childhood, Japan, teacher rating scale, confirmatory factor analysis, test-retest reliability, child development