Poster #6 - Preschool Children’s Self-Regulation and Prosocial Behaviors: Their Contributions to Early Academic Abilities

• In Event: Poster Session 04

Abstract

Preschool children are exposed to a wide range of interactions during their daily routines that promote more complex social relationships characterized by constant opportunities to enhance their self-regulatory abilities (Hay et al., 2009) and their early academic abilities (Coplan & Arbeau, 2009). In the present study, self-regulation abilities (both emotional and cognitive) and prosocial behaviors are explored as possible precursors that might be associated with children’s early academic skills. For children to successfully learn in the classroom, they need to adequately regulate their levels of mental and physical activity and to avoid paying attention to irrelevant stimuli while effortfully concentrating on the relevant information (Blair, 2002), but at the same time it is important for them to socially interact with other peers in positive ways. Hence, exploring the links between self-regulation and children’s early academic achievement can broaden our understanding of the interplay between different emotional and cognitive self-regulatory functions and their effects on children’s school readiness.
Participants were 193 Costa Rican children (M age = 72 months; S.D. = 8.05; 53 % girls) for whom parent- and teacher- reports were collected. Children were administered performance tests. The design of this study is cross-sectional. Participating children were evaluated in a series of psychological performance tests, through which their cognitive self-regulation (i.e., working memory was evaluated with self-directed signaling tests; Archibald & Kerns, 1999; inhibitory control with a modified version of the Stroop test; Gerstadt et al., 1994) and emotional self-regulation abilities (i.e., emotion regulation measure; Conejo, 2020; and effortful control (i.e., Children’s Behavior Questionnaire; Putnam & Rothbart). Prosocial behavior was measured using a modified version of the prosocial behavior scale (Rodríguez et al., 2010) and finally early academic abilities was measured with the Woodcock Inventory (Muñoz-Sandoval et al., 2004).
The relations between the two types of self-regulation, prosocial behaviors as possible indirect mechanism and early academic abilities as the criterion variable were tested with latent models using robust maximum likelihood as the estimator. Full information maximum likelihood was implemented to deal with the presence of missing data and the model’s goodness of fit was evaluated with CFI, TLI and RMSEA. The model showed an appropriate fit to the data (Ⲭ2(105) = 961.16, p < .001, CFI = 0.90, TLI = 0.91, RMSEA = 0.09 (0.08-0.11). Cognitive self-regulation was related with early academic abilities (b = 0.78, p = 0.009). Both cognitive and emotional self-regulation were related with prosocial behaviors (b = .17, p = .027 and b = .81, p < .001, respectively). Prosocial behaviors were related with early academic abilities (b = .15, p = .041).
Findings will focus on prosocial behavior as a possible mechanism by which self-regulatory abilities have an impact on early academic abilities, with an emphasis on how emotional and cognitive resources can jointly enhance children’s abilities to successfully navigate the challenges associated with positive adjustment during these transcendental years.

Authors

• L. Diego Conejo Bolanos, Universidad Nacional de Costa Rica
  Presenting Author

• Gustavo Carlo, University of California, Irvine

• Raquel Lozano, Universidad de Zaragoza