Poster #8 - A Novel Method for Directly Measuring Toddlers’ Self-Regulation Skills Remotely: The Find Bear Task

• In Event: Poster Session 07

Abstract

A growing body of research has examined children’s self-regulation during early and middle childhood, but evidence suggests that these skills begin developing even earlier, during the toddler years (Gagne, 2017). Although multiple methods of assessing self-regulation have been developed for these young children, more work is needed comparing these assessments. In this study, we compare multiple approaches to measuring self-regulation among a sample of 138 two-year-old children to address how do parent-report, observer-rating and observational measures of self-regulation in toddlers relate to one another. Self-regulation was assessed through parent- and examiner-ratings as well as a novel direct observational measure, designed to be easily administered via a videoconferencing call. Parent-ratings of toddlers’ self-regulation were measured as part of an online survey, where parents completed three subscales of the Early Childhood Behavior Questionnaire – Short Form (ECBQ-S; Putnam, Gartstein, & Rothbart, 2006): attentional focusing, attentional shifting, and inhibitory control. Following online testing sessions as part of the larger aims of the project, researchers rated the child’s behavior during the assessments using a modified version of the Preschool Self-Regulation Assessment (PSRA; Smith-Donald, Raver, Hayes, & Richardson, 2007). Composite measures representing subdomains of children’s self-regulation (attention regulation and impulsivity) were derived by averaging each subset of PSRA items to derive an examiner-rating of toddlers’ self-regulation. During a second video call, children completed our novel Find Bear task. For this self-regulation task, children were introduced to a cartoon bear and instructed to search for it in six different scenes (e.g., a classroom or a zoo), within a two-minute time limit. Importantly, the final image, our self-regulation image, did not have a bear in it, despite children receiving instructions to find the bear (see Figure 1). Persistence was coded as total search time during the final image, where it was impossible to find the bear, up to the 2-minute time limit (score range: 0 – 120 seconds). We analyzed bivariate correlations to examine how parent-report, examiner-rating, and observational measures of self-regulation relate to one another in toddlerhood. As can be seen in Table 1, our novel self-regulation task was significantly correlated with the other validated toddler self-regulation measures. We also analyzed relations with subscales of the Parenting Stress Index (PSI; Abidin, 1995), given literature suggesting negative associations between PSI subscales and children’s developing self-regulation skills (Ayoub et al., 2011), which we corroborated in our sample (see Table 1). Thus, we find initial supporting evidence for our novel Find Bear Task as a direct assessment of toddlers’ self-regulation skills. Results will be discussed highlighting additional research needed to establish the validity and reliability of our measure.

Authors

• Jorge Manuel Carvalho Pereira, University of Pittsburgh
  Presenting Author

• Leanne Elliott, University of Pittsburgh

• Portia Miller, University of Pittsburgh

• Taylor Montue, University of Pittsburgh

• Heather J. Bachman, University of Pittsburgh

• Elizabeth Votruba-Drzal, University of Pittsburgh

• Melissa E Libertus, University of Pittsburgh