A Prospective Investigation of Representation, Regulation, and the Transition to Formal Schooling

University Of California-Riverside, Riverside CA

Investigators

Abstract

Developmental and learning scientists increasingly acknowledge that early school success is as much about what children know as it is about how they come to know it. Yet scientists' appreciation for the processes that underlie early learning and educational adaptation has outpaced our understanding of these mechanisms. As a result, efforts to foster early school success for all children have been hampered. Children's mental representations (i.e., beliefs about self and other) and self-regulatory functioning (i.e., abilities to control emotions, behaviors, and physiology in accordance with contextual demands) are central mechanisms of both positive and problematic development. However, the individual and interactive contributions of representational and regulatory processes to early school success warrant further clarification. Children's self- and other-representations and their abilities to self-regulate are essential to their successful navigation of the worlds of peers, teachers, and learning. Moreover, representational and regulatory systems constitute core mechanisms by which experiential learning in the family transfers to the school setting. This investigation will trace the development and organization of representational and regulatory systems across the preschool period to clarify their individual and interactive contributions to early learning and school adjustment. Employing annual observations of parents, children, and parent-child interaction along with concurrent reports from children's teachers, this study will follow 240 4-year-old children from diverse backgrounds (i.e., 50% poverty; 50% Hispanic, 30% Black, and 15% White; variable exposure to stress and adversity) across the transition into second grade. Measures will assess representational and regulatory processes across multiple systems, including cognitive, emotional, behavioral, and physiological levels of analysis, to 1) trace the development of representational and regulatory processes across the early school years, 2) evaluate their individual and interactive contribution to educational adaptation, and 3) clarify if and how contextual factors, such as parenting, ethnicity, income and adversity, influence expected relations between representation, regulation, and the transition to formal schooling. This investigation will refine and expand our understanding of children's early learning and adaptation by tracing patterns of continuity and change within and across representational and regulatory systems across the early school years. In so doing, this research will contribute to our understanding of how children learn and, by extension, to innovative efforts that foster early learning and educational competence, particularly among children who are at disproportionate risk for school failure as a function of poverty, ethnicity, or adversity exposure. The transition to school constitutes a unique period of vulnerability to developmental influence, for better or worse, with powerful implications for youths' long term learning and success. By clarifying the interactions among context, representation, regulation and educational adjustment, this investigation will elucidate pathways of educational risk and resilience that will inform culturally and contextually sensitive efforts to facilitate children's safe passage across this critically important developmental transition.