Evaluating the SMARTS Program for Educators

The SMARTS (Strategies, Motivation, Awareness, Resilience, Talents, Success) Program empowers grades 2-12 students to understand how they learn by teaching critically important executive function strategies (Meltzer & Logan, 2025). This program is offered as a yearly licenced curriculum for elementary, middle, and high schools. Over 36,000 educators have attended their conferences, trainings, and/or workshops. There are 50 modular lessons split between each age-specific program and within are further divided into goal setting, cognitive flexibility, organizing and prioritizing, remembering (working memory), and self monitoring & checking.

Lessons include:

1. Teacher planning: The educator gets instructed what to write on the class boards for all students to refer to, what handouts to print off, the learning object, and the goal.

   - e.g., Goal setting

2. Metacognitive activator: Introduction for students to learn about the goal.

   - e.g., Ask students "What is a goal?", watch a video introduction

3. Guided instruction: The educator and students go over examples together.

   - e.g., "Is this a goal: I know how to play piano. Yes/No"

4. Independent practice: The student practices through discussion, writing, acting, creating, challenge, or digital activities. The educator provides feedback as needed.

   - e.g., Create your own goal.

5. Metacognitive wrap-up: The student watches a video and completes a knowledge check quiz.

   - e.g., What are two goals you have for this week? Check what is a goal, X what isn't a goal.

6. Extend the Learning: Educators can choose how to reflect further upon the goal of the session, connect with other executive function skills, and generalize strategies learned.

   - e.g., Create a Motivation Mind Map to learn how motivations impact achieving goals, Create a 'vision board' for long-term goals and to promote reflection.

Is there evidence for this program?

Although this program is rooted in 40+ years of Dr. Meltzer's work and published journals regarding executive functions (Meltzer & Logan, 2025), there is a limited number of empirical studies.

In one case study, there was observed progress in metacognitive and cognitive processes specifically through the organizing and prioritizing modules (Kovalčíková & Martinková, 2022). The organizing and prioritizing module included purposeful highlighting, triple-note-tote (categorizing information), BOTEC (making connections, formulating sentences, summarizing) skills. Pupils made progress in 15 out of 20 indicators related to metacognitive/cognitive processes such as reading comprehension, paraphrasing, and identifying key information (Kovalčíková & Martinková, 2022).

Another case study of a fourth-grade classroom involving 19 students, a teacher, and a principal also showed positive outcomes (Curry, 2024). 89% of students agreed to having enjoyed the curriculum stating it was engaging, gave them space to share personal experiences, and strategies were useful at school and at home. 84% of students agreed that the program improved their skills, and teachers cited observing students use stronger vocabulary and strategies (Curry, 2024). There was room for growth as well. Specifically, the flow of modules could be improved as it often jumped from one topic to the next. Moreover, there should be more time alloted for some activities and the curriculum should account for student variability in needs. The perspective shifting tasks were also observed to be particularly difficult and may need more explicit instruction.

Advantages and Disadvantages to the SMARTS Program

Advantages

• It provides explicit instruction on teaching children how to learn rather than solely on academic content, which can improve independence, motivation, and self-awareness for the student.

• The lessons follow a predictable structure and are adaptable across grades, subjects, level of support.

• The program includes MetaCOG surveys to monitor student progress.

• Pilot studies and case studies have shown improvements in metacognitive and cognitive abilities.

• Students find the program to be fun and engaging and teachers find it to be easy to implement.

Disadvantages

• There are limited peer-review empirical studies, instead relying heavily on self-report and case studies with small sample sizes. This makes generalizability difficult.

• There is no strong causal evidence shown by randomized control trials.

• There is no research on maintenance of skills over months or years.

• Most evidence is from the United States, so any samples may not transfer in the same capacity to other areas.

• The full curriculum requires a paid licence.

• The evidence is not focused on academic outcomes such as direct effects on grades or standardized tests.

References

Curry, R. (2024). A Study on the SMARTS Executive Functioning Curriculum: Explicitly Teaching Executive Functioning Skills in a Fourth-Grade Classroom. Digital Commons. https://digitalcommons.acu.edu/metl/78 

Kovalčíková, I., & Martinková, I. (2022). SMARTS programme and pupils’ Metacognitive abilities - a pilot study. The New Educational Review, 2022(Vol. 67), 17–29. https://doi.org/10.15804/tner.22.67.1.01

Meltzer, L., & Logan, M. (2025). SMARTS Program. https://smarts-ef.org/