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Teaching self-regulation at an early age has a positive effect on children's later educational success
A study by the Universities of Zurich and Mainz has shown that teaching attention and impulse management to children in primary school has a long-term positive effect on their later educational success. Self-regulation, the ability to manage attention, emotions and impulses and to persistently pursue individual goals, is not a skill that we normally associate with young children. However, the pandemic-related school closures and the increased use of digital media by children have now shown how important these skills are, especially for children. Studies show that people who demonstrated self-regulation as children have, on average, higher income, better health, and greater life satisfaction...
Teaching self-regulation at an early age has a positive effect on children's later educational success
A study by the Universities of Zurich and Mainz has shown that teaching attention and impulse management to children in primary school has a long-term positive effect on their later educational success.
Self-regulation, the ability to manage attention, emotions and impulses and to persistently pursue individual goals, is not a skill that we normally associate with young children. However, the pandemic-related school closures and the increased use of digital media by children have now shown how important these skills are, especially for children.
Studies show that people who demonstrated self-regulation as children have, on average, higher income, better health, and greater life satisfaction. They also show that the ability to self-regulate can be specifically trained in childhood. How can training self-regulation skills be integrated into everyday primary school life without taking up too much teaching time? Is it possible to adequately teach an abstract self-regulation strategy to young students? Does teaching such skills have the potential to improve educational success in the long term?
Self-regulation improves even with short training sessions
An international team from the Department of Economics at the University of Zurich (Switzerland) and the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (Germany) investigated these questions. Using a randomized controlled study in primary schools with more than 500 first graders, the research team was able to show that even a short training session led to a significant and lasting improvement in self-regulation. The training not only impacted self-regulation skills; The children had significantly improved reading skills and an improved focus on careless errors one year after training and were also significantly more likely to be admitted to high school three years after training.
Our study has shown how the training of this competence can be embedded early and explicitly into primary school lessons. Increasing self-regulation allows children to take more responsibility for their own learning and to set and work towards goals for themselves.”
Ernst Fehr, Professor, Faculty of Economics, University of Zurich
According to the last author, the easy scalability of the program can improve children's comprehensive key skills, which are fundamental for good educational attainment and a successful later life.
Easy integration into the regular timetable
Due to concerns arising from previous practical experience, the study authors designed the training sessions to be extremely cost-effective and time-saving so that they could be used in any elementary school setting: The training session lasted only five hours, and teachers took part in a three-hour training and received ready-made teaching materials that they could integrate directly into the regular lesson plan.
The training sessions were based on the MCII strategy (“Mental Contrasting with Implementation Intentions”), which has already been the subject of excellent research studies with adults and older students. The teachers presented the abstract strategy in a playful way using a picture book and the example of a hurdler. In a first step, the children imagined the positive effects of achieving a goal. They compared them to the obstacles they might encounter along the way (“Mental Contrasting”). The children then identified specific behaviors to address the obstacles and develop “when-then” plans (“implementation intention”).
Positive impact on society
"What's special about our study are the long-term follow-up effects that this short training session can have. These effects benefit the child and are transferred to society as a whole in a variety of ways over the course of the child's life," says lead author Daniel Schunk, Professor of Public and Behavioral Economics at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. “The fact that early investments in such basic skills not only benefit the child alone, but also society, should be given greater consideration in education policy.”
Source:
Reference:
Schunk, D., et al. (2022) Teaching self-regulation. Nature human behavior. doi.org/10.1038/s41562-022-01449-w.
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