Abstract
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.
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This work was supported by an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award grant [DE170100412].
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Howard, S.J., Vasseleu, E., Neilsen-Hewett, C. et al. Predicting Academic School Readiness and Risk Status from Different Assessment Approaches and Constructs of Early Self-Regulation. Child Youth Care Forum 51, 369–393 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10566-021-09636-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10566-021-09636-y