The Promotion of Self-Regulation as a Means of Enhancing School Readiness and Early Achievement in Children at Risk for School Failure

Abstract

This article reviews the literature on self-regulation and the development of school readiness and academic competence in early childhood. It focuses on relations between the development of cognitive aspects of regulation-referred to as executive functions and defined as abilities used to regulate information and to organize thinking in goal-directed activities-and the development of reactivity and regulation in stimulus-driven emotion, attention, and physiological stress response systems. It examines a bidirectional model of cognition-emotion interaction in the development of self-regulation in which top-down executive control of thought and behavior develops in reciprocal and interactive relation to bottom-up influences of emotion and stress reactivity. The bidirectional model is examined within the context of innovative preschool interventions designed to promote school readiness by promoting the development of self-regulation.