Self-Regulation, Executive Function, and Evidence-Based Study Strategies for Vietnamese Adolescents 14–19: An Operational Training Set

This paper is the executive-function and selfregulation operational extension of the developmental-psychology keystone (I1.1) for the Vietnamese adolescent guidance textbook series targeting learners aged 14 to 19. It synthesises the self-regulated-learning (SRL), executive-function (EF), cognitiveload, and study-strategy literatures to answer three questions: which study strategies have empirical support, which do not, and where does the empirical record divide; which strategies replicate cross-culturally and which remain bound to Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, Democratic (WEIRD) samples; and what is the operational training set — explicit, teachable in a textbook chapter — that a Vietnamese 16-year-old can deploy under high-stakes-exam pressure. The synthesis is purely literature-based; no cohort empirics, no human-subjects data, in compliance with the program's 2026-04-15 no-cohort directive. The substantive contribution is a strategy-by-evidenceby-deployability table that ranks ten candidate study strategies on three orthogonal axes (empirical support level, cognitive mechanism robustness, Vietnamese exam-context deployability) and identifies the displacement targets that consume Vietnamese adolescent study time without producing learning. Headline findings: practice testing, distributed practice, interleaved practice (for some content), elaborative interrogation, and selfexplanation are the high-evidence techniques that the Dunlosky et al. 2013 canonical synthesis ranks at the top; highlighting, summarisation, rereading, and learning-styles-matching are lowor no-evidence techniques that nonetheless dominate Vietnamese adolescent self-study time; the Hattie 2009 effect-size table has known statistical issues and should not be treated as a definitive ranking; mindset and grit popularisations have substantially weaker empirical support than their public profile suggests; Pomodoro has strong popular adoption and theoretical plausibility but a thin empirical base; the metacognitive-illusion problem is the single most important obstacle to adolescent strategy adoption — students systematically choose ineffective strategies because they feel productive. Vietnamese exam culture (chuyển cấp, kỳ thi tốt nghiệp THPT, đánh giá năng lực) provides a distinctive deployment context that the operational training set must address explicitly.