Abstract

Early childhood education programs, and particularly those designed to reduce gaps in school readiness between children in poverty and their more affluent peers, have increasingly addressed children’s self-regulatory abilities – their ability to manage behaviors, emotions, and cognitive processes. Although self-regulation is typically defined in volitional terms, the activity of multiple, involuntary, neurophysiological systems scaffolds the development of effortful self-regulation. In this article, we argue that the activity of one of these neurophysiological systems, the parasympathetic nervous system (PNS), is directly relevant to the design and evaluation of early childhood education programs, given that the PNS makes moment-to-moment adjustments in children’s metabolic output to support their interaction with the classroom environment. We go on to explain how examining PNS activity while children are in the early education classroom may offer insight into how early education programs achieve their effects and for whom these effects are most-fully realized. We conclude by offering a summary of modern methods of parasympathetic data collection and cleaning drawn from a recent study of young children in an early education environment and discussing the implications of these methods for future research.

摘要

早期儿童教育计划，特别是旨在减少贫困儿童与较富裕的同龄人之间的入学准备差距的计划，已经越来越多地关注儿童的自我调节能力，即他们管理行为，情感和认知过程的能力。尽管自我调节通常是用自愿性的术语来定义的，但多种非自愿的神经生理系统的活动却阻碍了努力的自我调节的发展。在本文中，我们认为这些神经生理系统之一（副交感神经系统（PNS））的活动与儿童早期教育计划的设计和评估直接相关，因为PNS会对儿童进行瞬间到瞬间的调整。儿童的新陈代谢输出可支持他们与课堂环境的互动。我们将继续解释如何在儿童处于早期教育课堂中时检查PNS活动，从而可以洞悉早期教育计划如何实现其效果以及对谁最有效地实现了这些效果。最后，我们对副交感神经数据收集和清理的现代方法进行了总结，该方法是从对早期教育环境中的幼儿的最新研究得出的，并讨论了这些方法对未来研究的影响。