Teaching self-regulation

Self-regulation abilities are important predictors of educational success as well as income and health. This paper reports a randomized-controlled field study of the effects of a short self-regulation teaching unit for first graders which is based on the idea of mental contrasting with implementation intentions. The treatment increased children’s impulse control and self-regulation as well as academic skills such as reading and monitoring careless mistakes. In addition, it had an effect on children’s long-term school career by increasing the likelihood of enrolling in an advanced secondary school track three years later. The study concludes that self-regulation teaching is easily scalable and integrated into the regular school curriculum at low cost and can improve important abilities and educational career path of children.

Author: Daniel Schunk, Eva M. Berger, Henning Hermes, Kirsten Winkel & Ernst Fehr

Source: Schunk, D., Berger, E.M., Hermes, H., Winkel, K. & Fehr, R. (2022). Teaching self-regulation. Nat Hum Behav 6, 1680–1690. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-022-01449-w

• Self-regulation means the ability to regulate attention, emotion, impulses, and behavior for pursuing one’s goals.
• It is important for children’s academic achievement as well as later life outcomes, such as income, wealth and health.
• It is the key skill for student success, especially during the increased usage of distance-learning methods in the 21st century.
• In this article, a short self-regulation teaching unit consisting of five lessons developed on the basis of ‘mental contrasting with implementation intentions (MCII)’ is presented.

What is MCII?

• MCII (mental contrasting with implementation intentions) is a metacognitive strategy addressing goal setting and striving and overcoming obstacles that are on the way of reaching one’s goals.
• MC part includes setting a goal and imagining the positive consequences of achieving the goal, thus enhancing goal commitment.
• It also includes thinking of the obstacles that prevent oneself of reaching the goal.
• II part includes identification of concrete behaviours for overcoming the obstacles and forming ‘when–then’ plans.
• ‘When—then’ plans consist of a concrete self-regulatory action whenever the identified obstacle emerges.
• II part is intended to automatize the implementation of behaviours that help overcome the obstacles.

The present study

Methods

The present study is a randomized field experiment with 572 schoolchildren in 31 first-grade classes in 12 schools in Germany.

• Treatment group: the children were taught five self-regulation lessons on the basis of MCII over five weeks. The lessons were tied to the teaching of practising reading and monitoring own mistakes. The children’s regular classteachers conducted the self-regulation teaching after they were instructed in a three-hour workshop how to implement the self-regulation teaching unit in the classroom and given full materials for the lessons.
• Control group: received regular classroom teaching consisting of language lessons (reading and writing) and mathematics lessons.
• For evaluating the treatment effects following measurements were used: standardized computer-based tests of children’s self-regulation abilities as well as their academic abilities in reading and mathematics. In addition, teachers’ assessments of the children’s reading and self-regulation skills were used.
• The outcome evaluations were carried out in four waves: prior to treatment (t0), 4–5 weeks after treatment (t1), 6 months after treatment (t2) and 12–13 months after treatment (t3). In addition, in a three-year follow-up, information about the children’s secondary school track enrolment was collected.

Teaching MCII to first graders

• First graders have limited abilities to understand general, abstract ideas and their reading and writing abilities are also very limited. In addition, they have limited goal setting skills, patience, attention span, and inhibition skills as well as a lack of perseverance and sense of responsibility for their own learning progress.
• To overcome these limited abilities, the MCII strategy was taught to the children through story telling.
• An illustrated storybook was used with a main character named ‘Hurdy’, the hurdle jumper, whose first goal is to climb to the top of a high mountain. Hurdy imagines the great view he will enjoy from the top of the mountain but contrasts this goal with the many hurdles he faces along the way. Hurdy’s when–then plan is that ‘when he faces a hurdle, then he jumps over it’. In this way, the abstract MCII strategy is conveyed in a playful and concrete manner for the children. The main character’s ideas and actions are used as a role model that helps to transfer the strategy to further goals, obstacles and plans.
• Once the general idea behind MCII was playfully introduced, the children subsequently applied it to three goals. The first goal was to become better in reading by practising reading out loud, because reading is a skill that is fundamental for all other subjects taught in primary school.
• The second goal was for the children to find careless mistakes in their own schoolwork by using a self-monitoring technique—the detection (and correction) of own mistakes.
• The third goal was individually chosen by each child.
• Every new goal was introduced with the help of the main character, Hurdy. After the teacher had read the story, the children themselves publicly discussed what they would enjoy most if they were able to read well. Likewise, after the teacher read aloud about the obstacles that Hurdy faced or the when–then rule that Hurdy developed, the children subsequently discussed publicly the hurdles they face themselves and possible when–then rules that help them overcome their obstacles.
• The children’s obstacles and plans thus become more and more personalized from goal one to goal three, implying an increasing need for own transfer thinking. In this context, classroom discourse also played an important role because it served the purpose of fostering the transfer of the MCII components from the role model’s thoughts, actions, and plans to the children’s individual context.

• Each child received a prepared workbook that visualized the different steps of the MCII strategy. The workbook also contained space so that the children could apply the strategy to their individual context with their own added drawings.
• The visual structure in combination with the individual drawings enables the children to internalize the MCII strategy without requiring reading or writing skills.
• Children’s limited perseverance was taken into account by spreading the five MCII teaching lessons over five weeks during which the children were encouraged to pursue progressively more ambitious sub-goals related to reading and monitoring their mistakes.
• To constantly remind them of the different steps of the MCII strategy, a large poster that looks exactly like the first figure in their workbook was on the wall in their classroom during the five weeks. In addition, flashcards were attached to the poster that reminded the children of the current goal, obstacles and plan.

Example of MMCI

• Setting a goal, e.g. becoming a better reader.
• Thinking the positive consequences of achieving the goal, e.g. why would you want to be a better reader, visualize it clearly
• Thinking of the obstacles that prevent you from achieving the goal, e.g. watching tv is easier for me than reading
• Thinking of when—then rules of how to overcome the obstacle, e.g. when I want to watch tv instead I ask my parents, friends or relatives to read with me.
• Keeping on the mind the positive consequences of achieving the goal and how you would enjoy when you have reached the goal.

Results

• MCII teaching already has a significant effect in t1 on the reading test, effect size = 0.20 standard deviation (s.d.), and the treatment effect in t3 becomes sizeable and highly significant, effect size = 0.39 s.d. A similar picture emerges from the teachers’ assessment of the children’s overall reading abilities.
• The teachers’ overall assessment of children’s ability to find careless mistakes follows a similar time pattern as their assessment of the overall reading ability: there is no treatment effect in t1, but significant and increasing treatment effects in t2, effect size = 0.47 s.d. and t3, effect size = 0.69 s.d.
• There was positive treatment effect on inhibition, effect size = 0.26 s.d. and attention, effect size = 0.56 s.d., 12–13 months after the treatment (t3).
• The teachers’ assessments of the children’s overall self-regulation behaviour in the classroom show a roughly similar time pattern: the treatment effect is significant and largest after 12–13 months, effect size = 0.57 s.d.
• MCII teaching had no impact on children’s mathematics skills (measured by arithmetic and geometry tests) and the letter discrimination task that requires stamina and frustration tolerance. These outcomes were not explicitly practiced during the MCII teaching. This suggests that first graders do not automatically generalize the MCII teaching to new academic domains or to tedious tasks that require stamina and high frustration tolerance.
• Children in the treatment group were 13.3 percentage points more likely to choose the advanced track of secondary schooling three years later, and the children’s performance in the reading test, their ability to find careless mistakes, and their overall self-regulation ability in t3 were important mediators of the treatment effect on school track choice.

Conclusions

• Self-regulation is generally thought to be of fundamental importance for children’s educational and lifetime success, and there is also a reason to believe that the earlier schoolchildren acquire self-regulation skills, the more they benefit from them in the long run.
• The findings indicate that five self-regulation teaching lessons spread over five weeks can be used to generate substantial improvements in academic skills—such as reading—that are part of the standard curriculum. In addition, teaching self-regulation has far-transfer effects on general inhibitory and attentional abilities and improves the children’s overall self-regulation behaviour in the classroom.
• The presented MCII intervention is conveyed in a playful, vivid, and meaningful manner and it is applied not only to one but to several different goals, making it more likely that children will internalize the metacognitive strategy, thus enhancing self-regulation behaviour at school in general.
• The implementation of the teaching lessons is associated with very little cost per child, as the teaching unit requires only a few hours of training for the teachers and five teaching lessons for the children.
• the proposed method of teaching self-regulation is also easily scalable to a much larger population, and if it is possible to apply self-regulation lessons to the teaching of reading skills, we see little reason why it should not be possible to apply the lessons to teach foreign languages or other academic subjects.