A person’s self-regulation skills can predict academic achievement, occupational success, health, wealth and relationships.
Poor self-regulation has been linked by research, to leaving school early, a higher likelihood of incarceration, substance abuse, obesity and dysfunctional relationships.
Despite its importance, this area is largely under-researched in the early childhood years.
However, a team of researchers from three New Zealand universities has set out to change this, and their world-leading study has just been awarded a Marsden Fund Council Award to extend their research.
Professor Vincent Reid is head of the School for Psychological and Social Sciences at the University of Waikato and a co-lead of the Kia Tīmata Pai (Best Start study).
The study seeks to measure the impact of supporting young children to develop their skills in language and emotional regulation.
“It’s actually understanding how do we support children’s development of self-regulation and to look at that at all levels,” Reid says.
“So cognition and thinking in the mind, how that’s manifested in behaviour, and then actually underneath those, what’s going on in the brain.”
“But then, we’re actually looking at that in relation to an intervention to look at those links between self-regulation and then the development of academic skills,” Reid continues.
The researchers are working to find out if there is a link between early oral language skills, and self-regulation, as well as links that can be made between self-regulation and mathematics.
“Typically in education studies, you look at how does a child read, or how does a child do mathematics or other forms of numeracy,” Reid says.
“But we’re looking at what underpins those skills.
“So rather than looking at, say, mathematics itself, what we do is look at regulation or working memory.
Those are things that you don’t test or assess in a classroom, he says, but working memory is actually highly predictive of mathematical capacities.
“So if you develop things that actually facilitate or engender working memory, then what you get is a benefit in mathematics.
“It’s almost like the underpinning psychology of these behaviours and skills that we want children to have in the class.
“We’re trying to understand those things and how they relate to what goes on in the classroom, and that’s one of the exciting things about this.”
Reid has expertise in brain development and how to measure different aspects of brain function, and Professor Elaine Reese from University of Otago, another co-lead on the study, is one of the world’s leading specialists in children’s and adolescents’ autobiographical memory, language, and literacy.
“So you can see how she ties in very strongly to what we’re doing,” Reid says.
“And Justin O’Sullivan, who’s the director of the Liggins Institute up at the University of Auckland, his background is in genetics, but he has very strong expertise in longitudinal work.
“So put the three of us together and we’ve got a team where everyone brings something to the table that actually enriches what we can do.”
Kia Tīmata Pai began in 2021 and was initially funded to run for four years, but the three-year Marsden Fund Council Award administered by the Royal Society Te Apārangi, will extend this out to seven.
“We realised to capitalise on what we’re doing, we needed to move it through into those slightly older ages,” Reid explained.
The study involves 1600 children from a variety of social and cultural backgrounds.
“We’ve started this intervention around age three, and we’ve been looking at them every nine months or so,” Reid explains.
“And now we’re moving into the point where they’re ages 6 and 7.
“This is a critical time to measure the emergence of academic functioning, because early success or failure in things like reading and mathematics, actually shapes the rest of a person’s academic journey.”
Longitudinal studies such as this are important, Reid says, because they examine how things change over time.
“Almost all of the studies that actually measure what’s going on in the brain, are cross-sectional studies, where you say, ‘OK everyone is now 4, so let’s look at what’s going on at age 4’,” he says.
“But what you need to do to understand how things change over time is one of these longitudinal studies where you take the same participants and then you look at what’s happening with them over time … this gives us this a really strong way of saying, ‘here’s how things change’.”
Commentary from those who have reviewed Kia Tīmata Pai have said such an investigation into the emergence of executive control is completely absent from neuroscience literature.
“Executive control, executive function, those are aspects related to how you regulate yourself,” Reid explains.
“And so, the fact that those are so important, and the fact that [the research] is not even there, some people are saying, ‘hey, this is amazing, how do we not know this stuff?’.
“So it’s really exciting to be able to try and dig into this and understand the relationships between these things, and why there are relationships between how children thrive intellectually and how learning is tied to brain function.
“That’s a really exciting thing that we can do that just hasn’t been done before,” he says.
