Background

Over the past few decades early self-regulation has been identified as foundational to positive learning and wellbeing trajectories. As a consequence, a wide range of approaches have been developed to capture children’s developmental progress in self-regulation. Little is known, however, about whether and which of these are reliable indicators of future ability and risk for young children.

Objective

This study examined measures from prominent approaches to self-regulation assessment (i.e., task-based, observation, adult-report) to determine: their structure; how these predict future academic school readiness in 3–5-year-old children, individually and if combined; and whether thresholds could be ascertained to reliably discriminate those children at risk of poor academic outcomes.

Methods

Longitudinal analyses were conducted on start-of-year self-regulation data from 217 children in the final year of pre-school, using three prominent approaches to self-regulation assessment, and their end-of-year school readiness data. Data were subjected to path analysis, structural equation modelling and receiver operating characteristic curve analyses.

Results

Start-of-year cognitive self-regulation indices—but not behavioral or emotional self-regulation indices—from each approach reliably predicted school readiness 7 months later, just prior to commencing school. Only when combined into a composite score was a threshold with sufficient sensitivity and specificity for predicting school readiness risk established; yet this provided better prediction of true-negative than true-positive cases.

Conclusions

Taken together, these results suggest the importance of cognitive self-regulation in particular for school readiness, as measured here, although self-regulation is just one of the contributing factors to school readiness risk.

中文翻译：

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从不同的评估方法和早期自我调节的构建预测学术入学准备和风险状态

背景

在过去的几十年里，早期的自我调节被认为是积极学习和幸福轨迹的基础。因此，已经开发了广泛的方法来捕捉儿童在自我调节方面的发展进步。然而，关于这些是否以及哪些是幼儿未来能力和风险的可靠指标，我们知之甚少。

客观的

这项研究检查了自我调节评估的主要方法（即基于任务、观察、成人报告）的措施，以确定：它们的结构；这些如何预测 3 至 5 岁儿童未来的学业准备，单独或合并；以及是否可以确定阈值以可靠地区分那些有学习成绩不佳风险的儿童。

方法

对来自学前最后一年的 217 名儿童的年初自我调节数据进行纵向分析，使用三种主要的自我调节评估方法，以及他们的年终入学准备数据。数据经过路径分析、结构方程建模和接受者操作特征曲线分析。

结果

来自每种方法的年初认知自我调节指数——但不是行为或情绪自我调节指数——可靠地预测了 7 个月后，就在开学前的入学准备情况。只有当合并到一个综合评分中时，才能建立一个具有足够敏感性和特异性的阈值来预测入学准备风险；然而，这提供了比真阳性病例更好的真阴性预测。

结论

综上所述，这些结果表明认知自我调节的重要性，尤其是对入学准备的重要性，正如这里所衡量的，尽管自我调节只是入学准备风险的促成因素之一。