Faculty Bibliography

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.

Young children's self-regulation has increasingly been identified as an important predictor of their skills versus difficulties when navigating the social and academic worlds of early schooling. Recently, researchers have called for greater precision and more empirical rigor in defining what we mean when we measure, analyze, and interpret data on the role of children's self-regulatory skills for their early learning (Cole, Martin, & Dennis, 2004; Wiebe, Espy, & Charak, 2008). To address that call, this chapter summarizes our efforts to examine self-regulation in the context of early education with a clear emphasis on the need to consider the comprehensiveness and precision of measurement of self-regulation in order to best understand its role in early learning.