We were curious about… self-regulation in the classroom
Self-regulation is crucial for children’s learning and development. It enables children to pay attention, make plans and keep their emotions in a balanced state. While self-regulation is generally assumed to be a stable skill within a child, recent work suggests that children’s self-regulation can vary across situations.
A typical school day encompasses a wide range of activities including teacher and child-led learning and interacting with other children. Previous studies have explored how executive functions can vary between children, but we wanted to explore how an individual child’s self-regulation might vary between different activities.
So we… observed how children’s self-regulation varied within a naturalistic classroom setting
Our study involved 148 four and five year olds in 28 classrooms across 14 schools in England. At the start and the end of the school year we asked each child to complete five executive function tasks to assess working memory, inhibition, shifting and verbal and non-verbal generativity.
We measured children’s self-regulation by coding videos of each child during a teacher-led activity and a child-led activity. We used a measure called the Regulation-Related Skills Measure to rate the children’s self-regulation, such as “child pays attention to the activity at hand”.
We compared children’s self-regulation in child-led activities and teacher-led activities, and also analysed whether children’s executive functions were associated with their self-regulation in different activities.
We learned that… children with higher executive function have more stable self-regulation across different activities
Most children successfully self-regulated in the classroom – they obtained high scores in the classroom observations.
Children’s self-regulation varied by classroom situation. Children showed higher levels of self-regulation in child-led than in teacher-led classroom activities.
Our study shows that executive functions support children’s early learning: Children with higher executive functions at the start of the school year showed both higher levels of self-regulation and more stable self-regulation across situations.
Our findings suggest that children with lower levels of executive functions may need additional support to remain self-regulated across contexts. These children may need additional support to apply their self-regulation successfully and are likely to benefit from child-led activities.
This research was conducted by Janina Eberhart as part of her PhD studies.
The paper was published by The British Psychological Society on 16 June 2024. The full article can be found here.
