Investigating Self-Regulation in Young Children Through the Analysis of Self-Directed Speech

• In Event: Innovative Methods for Studying Children’s Self-Efficacy, Self-Regulation, and Self-Determination In and Out of School Settings

Abstract

There are many methods used for assessing self-regulatory abilities in adults and older children, including self-report questionnaires, interviews, think aloud methods, stimulated recall, on-line computer-logfiles and behavioural measures. However, these instruments have suffered from criticisms about their validity, particularly in research with children (Whitebread et al., 2009). Self-report measures are verbally based, relying on the ‘limited’ language and memory abilities of young children. At the same time, children are rather sensitive to the contextual conditions involved in experimental procedures, and often consistently under-perform.

However, recent studies observing young children’s self-regulatory behaviour in naturalistic settings (Shamir, Mevarech & Gida, 2009; Whitebread et al., 2009) have brought out many unrevealed self-regulatory performances (Whitebread & Pino Pasternak, 2010). Winne and Perry (2000) suggest that there are several advantages of systematic observation methods in a naturalistic setting over self-report methods or controlled experiments. Such a procedure does not rely on the participants’ recall, impressions or beliefs of what they do, nor upon the verbal abilities of the children.

At the same time, purely observational methods are open to the criticism that the interpretation of the behavior observed relies heavily upon theoretical inference. In this context, the investigation of children’s self-regulation through their production of self-directed speech is particularly valuable. It emerges spontaneously and can be recorded in children’s everyday activities. As such, it might provide more direct evidence of children’s cognitive processing during playful and problem-solving activities.

The term ‘self-directed speech’ is nowadays widely accepted term in describing the phenomenon of an expressive language which is directed to self, for the purpose of self-regulating one own’s cognitive, emotional and motivational processes. As originally set out by Vygotsky (1978), self-directed speech is a critical component of the development of a child’s thought and intellect. Therefore, characteristics of self-directed speech might provide valuable insight into children’s symbolic thinking (Patrick & Abravanel, 2000). This would also mean that investigation of self-directed speech would be one of the best methods for exploring strategies employed in the self-regulation of young children’s behavior.

In the study reported, we employed an innovative approach in collecting and analyzing self-directed speech and co-occurring self-regulatory behavior. Preschool children were video-recorded in a naturalistic school setting while being engaged in activities of their own choice. Moreover, they were not explicitly directed to produce self-directed speech. Subsequently, participants were video-recorded while engaged in tasks specially designed to elicit spontaneous self-directed speech by providing an intermediate level of difficulty for each individual child.

In the analysis of the children’s self-directed speech, children’s speech patterns and co-occurring self-regulatory behavior patterns were identified using video and analyzed using lag sequential analysis and THEME software. By this means, instead of focusing on overall correlations between frequencies of self-directed speech and self-regulatory behaviour, and subsequent task performance, our research focused directly on exploring the temporal interaction between self-directed speech and the co-occurring self-regulatory behavior.

Authors

• Martina Kuvalja, University of Cambridge

• David Whitebread, University of Cambridge