What is Smarts?
Developed by Dr. Lynn Meltzer and staff, and launched online in 2015, the SMARTS Executive Function curriculum empowers students by helping them to understand their strengths and challenges, and teaching them critically important executive function strategies, including why, where, when, and how to use these strategies.
“The SMARTS curriculum provides me with an excellent avenue to work on general EF skills when there is not something specific and individual to work on with my one-on-one students. It is a great addition to my toolbox for teaching EF strategies!”
K-12 SPECIALIST
SMARTS Online
Executive Function Curriculum
Now more than ever, students need to learn HOW to learn.
SMARTS Elementary is designed for students in grades 2-5, and SMARTS Secondary is intended for middle and high school students. Both programs are easy to customize, appropriate for use with students of different ages and abilities, and in a variety of learning settings including general classrooms, special education classrooms, remote learning environments, and after-school programs.
Each curriculum includes 30 lessons addressing 5 key areas of executive function:
- goal setting
- thinking flexibly
- organizing and prioritizing
- accessing working memory
- self-monitoring and checking
SMARTS has been continually enhanced to deliver up-to-date strategies that can be easily embedded into the daily curriculum in all content areas ( English LA, science, social studies, math). Both the elementary and secondary programs include training and support resources, easy-to-use lesson sorters, and lesson extensions that integrate SMARTS into specific areas of learning (e.g., homework, projects, test taking, math & science, ELA & social studies, community building, and self-advocacy). The elementary program also includes a full-color student workbook.
Want to learn more? Contact us, or visit the SMARTS website.
Metacog
MetaCOG, a classroom-based survey system that assesses students’ self-ratings of their motivation, effort, and strategy use, has been refined and adjusted on an ongoing basis after its development and publication by Dr Lynn Meltzer in 2004. MetaCOG-Online, launched in 2021, is the interactive, online version of this survey tool that provides teachers with critically important information about students’ use of executive function strategies as well as their motivation, effort, and persistence.
MetaCOG Online:
- Helps students develop an understanding of their learning profiles, including their executive function strengths and challenges.
- Allows teachers to collect data on students’ EF strategy use throughout the school year.
- Identifies next steps and priority areas that can be used to customize whole-class instruction and/or create personalized plans for individual students.
The MetaCOG Surveys & Toolkit helps students develop an understanding of their learning profiles, including their executive function strengths and challenges, what motivates them, and what helps them persist.
Pairing the SMARTS Executive Function curriculum with MetaCOG Online is a powerful way to collect data in the classroom and structure EF strategy instruction for maximum student impact.
Click here to learn more about MetaCOG Online.