Operationalization of self-regulation in the early years: comparing policy with theoretical underpinnings
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Research has consistently demonstrated that self-regulation is essential for the development and preservation of health and well-being in the early years and across the lifespan. Based on the emerging literature on the important role of self-regulation in promoting healthy child development, policymakers have made efforts to include self-regulation skills in practice and policy documents worldwide. Despite efforts to include self-regulation skills in early years curriculum documents, there is limited understanding by teachers, scholars, and policymakers of what self-regulation is and how best to support it in the day-to-day classroom. This limited understanding is perpetuated by a lack of a unified definition of self-regulation. Thus, it becomes important to examine these efforts in a critical way. In Ontario, where the research was completed, a revised play-based full-day kindergarten program was introduced in 2016. In this research we use a qualitative document analysis approach to compare the conceptualization of self-regulation in Ontario’s revised play-based kindergarten program with theory-driven models of self-regulation from empirical research. Analysis was iterative, and themes emerged based upon a coding scheme developed by the research team. Results suggest that co-regulation has a powerful influence on student learning. In addition, the policy document de-emphasizes behavioral regulation and expands cognitive regulation to include more than inhibitory control. Lastly, the kindergarten program discusses metacognition in relation to the use of language to articulate one’s thinking with little attention to goal-directed behaviors. In this paper, explicit recommendations for policymakers and practitioners are provided to ensure that emerging conceptualizations of self-regulation are promoted in early years curricula. Further, empirical evidence is needed to support why it is necessary to understand emerging conceptualizations of self-regulation and outline implications for current early years curricula.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".