Learning Self-Regulatory Strategies: The Role of Content

• In Event: Early Learning and Teaching: How Do Preschoolers Decide Who to Learn From and Who to Teach?

Abstract

Successful self-regulation is a critical milestone in childhood. Research has highlighted the importance of social influences in children’s developing self-regulation abilities (McCabe, Cunnington, & Brooks-Gunn, 2004). This work is built upon classic perspectives such as social developmental theory, which argues that every social-cognitive competency originates from interpsychological relationships before becoming internalized by the child (Vygotsky, 1978). Children initially rely on parents and other caregivers to aid in regulation before they acquire the necessary cognitive capacities to develop and employ their own strategies (Morris et al., 2007). However, the influence of social others on children’s self-regulation has focused almost exclusively on correlational studies documenting the relationship between general parental characteristics and children’s self-regulation (von Suchodoletz et al., 2011; Schweitzer & Sulzer-Azaroff, 1988; Lee et al., 2008). To date, no research has focused on the mechanisms by which children learn self-regulation from others.
Here, we explored how children learn effective self-regulatory strategies through interaction with a social other. We examined children’s strategy imitation when the adult’s actions and verbal information conflict. Four-year-old children (N=64) watched an adult perform a delay-of-gratification task. Across four between-subjects conditions, the model either did or did not state the importance of completing the task (positive v. negative instruction), modeled two strategies, and then either did or did not complete the task (positive v. negative behavior). Children were then invited to engage in the same delay task and a novel task. We examined children’s imitation of the learned self-regulatory strategies in the same context, and their generalization to a novel context. Participants were coded for whether they imitated the strategies, the frequency and duration of strategy use, and whether they successfully completed the tasks.
Table 1 displays children’s strategy imitation across the four conditions during the familiar task. Figures 2-3 display the frequency and duration of strategy use, respectively. Inspection of these figures indicates that participants in the Negative Instruction-Positive Behavior condition imitated more strategies and engaged in the strategies more often and for a longer amount of time, as compared to the two conditions where the model exhibited negative behavior: Positive Instruction-Negative Behavior (imitation: U=67.0, p<.05; frequency: U=68.0, p<.05; duration: U=66.0, p<.05), and Negative Instruction-Negative Behavior (imitation: U=88.0, p<.05; frequency: U=87.0, p<.05; duration: U=82.5, p<.05).
Next, we explored the relationship between children’s observation of the model’s behavior (Positive, Negative) and children’s task completion of the task; participants who observed Positive Behavior were more likely to wait than participants who observed Negative Behavior, X2(1, 64)=5.50, p<.05.
We explored children’s extension of strategies to a novel situation. Children in the two positive behavior conditions were more likely to use the learned self-regulatory strategies during the novel task, X2(1, 64)=7.86, p<.05.
These results highlight children’s reliance on social information when learning self-regulatory strategies. Our findings suggest that children can learn and utilize novel strategies after a short training period. Although children attend to both verbal and nonverbal information from the model, our findings suggest that nonverbal behavior may be more important to children – especially in cases of conflict.
 

Author

• Grace Min, Boston University