Self-Regulation Early Childhood: Improving Conceptual Clarity and Developing Ecologically Valid Measures

Children's ability to direct their attention and behavior to learning tasks provides a foundation for healthy social and academic development early schooling. Although an explosion of research on this topic has occurred recent years, the field has been hindered by a lack of conceptual clarity, as well as debate over underlying components and their significance predicting school success. addition, few measures tap these skills as children move into formal schooling. This article describes the aspects of self-regulation that are most important for early school success. It then discusses methodological challenges reliably and validly assessing these skills young children and describes recent advances direct measures of self-regulation that are reliable and ecologically valid and that predict children's school success. It concludes by summarizing critical issues the study of self-regulation school contexts and discussing next steps.