CHILD DEVELOPMENT PERSPECTIVES The Promotion of Self-Regulation as a Means of Enhancing School Readiness and Early Achievement in Children at Risk for School Failure

This article reviews the literature on self-regulation and the development of school readiness and academic competence in early childhood. It focuses on relations between the development of cognitive aspects of regulation—referred to as executive functions and defined as abilities used to regulate information and to organize thinking in goal-directed activities—and the development of reactivity and regulation in stimulus-driven emotion, attention, and physiological stress response systems. It examines a bidirectional model of cognition–emotion interaction in the development of self-regulation in which top-down executive control of thought and behavior develops in reciprocal and interactive relation to bottom-up influences of emotion and stress reactivity. The bidirectional model is examined within the context of innovative preschool interventions designed to promote school readiness by promoting the development of self-regulation. KEYWORDS—executive functions; emotion regulation; selfregulation; school readiness Many studies have demonstrated the role of self-regulation in academic achievement with children in preschool and the early elementary grades. Some of these studies measure self-regulation in terms of aspects of temperament and attention such as effortful control (Valiente, Lemery-Chalfant, Swanson, & Reiser, 2008), while others have examined self-regulation in terms of socialCorrespondence concerning this article should be addressed to Clancy Blair, Department of Applied Psychology, New York University, 196 Mercer Street, 8th Floor, New York, NY 10012-9873; e-mail: [email protected]. a 2011 The Authors Child Development Perspectives a 2011 The Society for Research in Child Development DOI: 10.1111/j.1750-8606.2011.00209.x Volume 6, Number 2, 2 emotional well-being and positive social relationships with teachers and peers (Denham, 2006; Mashburn & Pianta, 2006). Still others have measured self-regulation in terms of the ability to persist and to delay gratification (Mischel, Shoda, & Rodriguez, 1989), while yet again others have examined executive functions (EF) and the ability to organize information and engage in rule-based and goal-directed tasks (Blair & Razza, 2007; McClelland et al., 2007). The findings of numerous studies make it clear that self-regulation meaningfully predicts academic achievement. What is less clear, however, is how the various emotional, attentional, and cognitive aspects of self-regulation measured in studies of school readiness are interrelated yet also distinct. To address this question of the unity as opposed to diversity of self-regulation abilities in young children, we focus primarily on two constructs—EF and emotion regulation—and present a developmental model that examines relations between them. We then examine how the model is relevant to innovative curricula to promote school readiness and academic achievement.