Preliminary construct and concurrent validity of the Preschool Self-regulation Assessment (PSRA) for field-based research

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Abstract

This study introduces a portable direct assessment of young children's self-regulation—the Preschool Self-Regulation Assessment (PSRA). The PSRA was designed to assess self-regulation in emotional, attentional, and behavioral domains by using a brief, structured battery of tasks in conjunction with a global report of children's behavior. Factor analyses from a pilot sample (N = 63) of Head Start children revealed two self-regulation factors reflecting children's performance on tasks of impulse control and tasks of compliance/executive control. Assessor report of children's behavior during the assessment was reduced into two additional factors reflecting children's global attention/impulse control and positive emotion. Moderate correlations between self-regulation factors and children's social competence, behavior problems, and early academic skills, provide preliminary evidence of the new measure's validity, and additional empirical evidence for bivariate relations between academic and self-regulatory competence.

Section snippets

Emotion, attention, and behavior: Three domains of self-regulation

Self-regulation involves modulating systems of emotion, attention, and behavior in response to a given situation or stimulus (Calkins & Fox, 2002; Carlson, 2003; Eisenberg, Smith, Sadovsky, & Spinrad, 2004). This includes managing emotions, shifting or focusing attention, and both inhibiting and activating behaviors. Research on infant temperament suggests that young children differ from one another in their biobehavioral reactivity, with variations in threshold, intensity, and duration of

Assessing young children's self-regulatory skills

Extant measures of child socioemotional and behavioral regulation include structured and semi-structured lab assessments, unstructured “natural” observation, teacher report, and parent report. Structured lab assessments provide a means of comparing children's responses to the same situation. For example, separation, disappointment, and frustration paradigms (e.g., Cole, Zahn-Waxler, & Smith, 1994; Garner & Power, 1996; Molitor, Mayes, & Ward, 2003) allow researchers to directly observe

Study aims and hypotheses

To address this methodological gap, the following study provides preliminary evidence for a reliable and relatively quick means of collecting valid, structured data on children's self-regulation. The aims of the study were as follows:

  • (1)

    Develop a structured assessment of preschoolers’ self-regulatory skills that is reliable, viable for field research, and taps natural variation across children. Specifically, our aim is to develop a measure such that: (a) assessors can be trained in a short amount

Participants

Two Head Starts in Chicago were selected as demonstration sites from the set of sites surveyed for the Chicago School Readiness Project (CSRP). One site serves communities comprised largely of Hispanic families while the second site serves communities which are majority Black.

Eighty-eight children aged 41–70 months were recruited for the pilot study. Of these, 64 (73%) children were consented by their parents to participate. One child completed the assessment over 2 days due to the family's

Latent factor structure

A primary goal of this study is to determine whether lab-based assessments can be translated to field contexts and still yield similar results to those found in lab contexts. As a result, exploratory factor analyses were conducted independently for the PSRA tasks and assessor report items. Given the sample is small and not nationally representative, principal component extraction was used. Therefore the results provide a description of the sample, but cannot necessarily be generalized to the

Discussion

Analyses from this study suggest that the PSRA makes several contributions to research in early childhood and education. First, our piloted measures were successfully administered in the field following a brief training process. PSRA tasks were coded reliably and elicited substantial variability in children's performance, suggesting that Kochanska and colleagues’ landmark, lab-based tasks translate well to field research, as do short tasks of executive control and compliance. Comparison of PSRA

Acknowledgments

This research was funded by the McCormick Tribune Foundation and the NICHD Interagency Consortium on School Readiness. Special thanks go to the families and staff of the participating Head Start programs. In addition, we gratefully acknowledge the contributions of the staff of the Chicago School Readiness Project and we appreciate the helpful comments of Molly Metzger and Christine Li-Grining.

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