Self-Regulation and Executive Functioning: A Focus on Early Childhood

By Dr Ng Ee Lynn
Senior Education Research Scientist, OER Centre for Research in Child Development, NIE, NTU
Senior Research Scientist, National Institute of Education - Office of Education Research, NTU
Published: 1 May 2023

Overview of Self-Regulation and Executive Function Skills

Self-regulation is a multi-faceted construct that describes the ability to control thoughts, feelings, and actions to achieve goal-directed behaviours. It consists of different constructs including executive functions, behavioral self-regulation, and emotion regulation.

Executive function (EF) skills are general cognitive processes that support explicit and effortful control of one’s attention, thoughts, and behaviours to perform goal-directed actions (Blair & Ku, 2022). It is typically conceptualized as a multi-componential framework that comprises three distinct but related skills: cognitive flexibility, inhibition, and working memory (Lee et al., 2013; Miyake et al., 2000).

• • Cognitive flexibility refers to the ability to shift between alternative sets of mental operations or to consider multiple options simultaneously.

  • Inhibition is the ability to resist interference from competing or prepotent responses.

  • Working memory refers to the ability to refresh, maintain, and manipulate information in the presence of new knowledge.

Behavioural self-regulation (BSR), also known as EF in overt behaviour, involves the intentional application of multiple EF skills to regulate socially contextualized behaviours. Emotional self-regulation is defined as the ability to modulate strong emotional reactions with adaptive strategies.

In early childhood, each aspect of self-regulation is significantly associated with a variety of pre-academic and academic skills, including numeracy, literacy, vocabulary, and mathematics. Research has also highlighted that children who are able to regulate their attention, behaviour, and emotions are better at navigating complex social interactions that involve recognizing one’s and others’ emotions, building friendships and relationships, and cooperating with others. These findings underscore the importance of self-regulation skills for children to navigate complex learning and social environments during early childhood and beyond.

The Singapore Context

The first large-scale longitudinal study of preschool education in Singapore, i.e., the Singapore Kindergarten Impact Project (SKIP), tracked the development of 1,500 children from Kindergarten 1 (age 5) to Primary 1 (age 7). Findings from SKIP revealed some insights about the concurrent and predictive influences of children’s self-regulation skills on various learning outcomes during early childhood.

1. 1. At age 5, children’s EF skills and fine motor skills compensate for each other in different ways for spelling and math skills (Khng & Ng, 2021). For spelling, good EF skills compensated for poor fine motor skills, and vice versa. For math, the contribution of EF to math was larger for children with better compared to poorer fine motor skills. The reverse was also true – fine motor skills predicted math only in children with high EF.

   2. Children’s EF and behavioural self-regulation skills at age 6 contributed to explaining socio-economic disparities in math achievement at entry to primary school at age 7 (Ng et al., 2021).

   3. Within the context of learning English, a socially dominant language in Singapore, one aspect of EF – working memory – contributes to English vocabulary acquisition in 5-year-olds (Sun et al., 2018). The role of working memory and other internal resources of the child (e.g., phonological awareness) were more substantial compared to the role of external resources (e.g., how frequently English is spoken at home, number of English books at home, amount of English used with family members) in English vocabulary acquisition.

International studies have shown that the three EF components (cognitive flexibility, working memory, inhibition) emerge as a unitary construct in two- to-six-year-olds and begin to differentiate into three separable components during middle childhood and into adulthood. Local data based on 688 participants show that the process of EF differentiation across 6- to 15-year-olds occurs over a protracted period (Lee et al., 2013). Beginning with an undifferentiated EF structure in the preschool and early kindergarten years, early differentiation emerges during the transition to formal schooling. The differentiation into a three-factor structure occurs over a protracted period, with signs of early differentiation emerging at age 11 and reaching some stability at age 15.

In Practice

Educators play an important role in supporting the development of children’s self-regulation skills. Environments that foster EF skills are characterized by adult provision of substantial scaffolding to help children practice emerging EF skills before they are expected to perform on their own (Center on the Developing Child, 2011).

Social play experiences provide an important practice ground for children to develop the emerging EF skills that adults have been scaffolding for them (Center on the Developing Child, 2011). Play provides numerous opportunities for children to make plans and coordinate play activities with one another, e.g., communicate with their friends about role assignments during dramatic play, keeping track of what each actor has done and what comes next, and managing conflicts and disagreements.

Ideas for enhancing and practicing EF skills with children:

https://developingchild.harvard.edu/resources/activities-guide-enhancing-and-practicing-executive-function-skills-with-children-from-infancy-to-adolescence/

Takeaways

Self-regulation in early childhood is a key predictor of subsequent success in the domains of academic achievement, financial wealth, as well as physical and socio-emotional well-being.

There is significant individual variation in the nature and pace of developmental trajectories of self-regulation skills. Positive adult-child interactions can promote and facilitate the development of these skills and play a protective role against environmental adversity, in particular poverty-related risk (Blair & Ku, 2022).

Although self-regulation is understood to be a multi-faceted construct, more research is needed to understand: (a) which specific components of self-regulation are most predictive of key developmental outcomes in the academic and socio-emotional domains, and (b) whether and how self-regulation constructs interact with other skills to influence development. Such findings will contribute to the development of early childhood programs that support and foster targeted skill development (Korucu et al., 2022).

References

Blair, C., & Ku, S. (2022). A hierarchical integrated model of self-regulation. Frontiers in Psychology, 13, 725828. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.725828

Center on the Developing Child (2011). Building the brain’s “air traffic control” system: How early experiences shape the development of executive function (Working Paper 11). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University. https://developingchild.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/How-Early-Experiences-Shape-the-Development-of-Executive-Function.pdf   

Khng, K. H., & Ng, E. L. (2021). Fine motor and executive functioning skills predict math and spelling skills at the start of kindergarten: A compensatory account. Journal for the Study of Education and Development, 44(3), 675-718.  https://doi.org/10.1080/02103702.2021.1897232

Korucu, I., Ayturk, E., Finders, J., Schnur, G., Bailey, C. S., Tominey, S., & Schmitt, S. (2022). Self-regulation in preschool: Examining its factor structure and associations with pre-academic skill and social-emotional competence. Frontiers in Psychology, 12, 717317. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.717317

Lee, K., Bull, R., & Ho, R. M. (2013). Developmental changes in executive functioning. Child Development, 84(6), 1933-1953. https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.12096

Miyake, A., Friedman, N. P., Emerson, M. J., Witzki, A. H., Howerter, A., & Wager, T. D. (2000). The unity and diversity of executive functions and their contributions to complex “frontal lobe” tasks: A latent variable analysis. Cognitive Psychology, 41(1), 49-100. https://doi.org/10.1006/cogp.1999.0734

Ng, E. L., Bull, R., & Khng, K. H. (2021). Accounting for the SES-math achievement gap at school entry: Unique mediation paths via executive functioning and behavioral self-regulation. Frontiers in Education, 6, 703112.  https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2021.703112

Sun, H., Yin, B., Amsah, N. F. B. B., & O'Brien, B. A. (2018). Differential effects of internal and external factors in early bilingual vocabulary learning: The case of Singapore. Applied Psycholinguistics, 39(2), 383-411.  https://doi.org/10.1017/S014271641700039X