How early self-regulation increases educational success

Teaching children how to manage their attention and impulses positively affects later educational success, according to research.

The study was conducted by the universities of Zurich and Mainz, and shows how training these skills can become part of early primary school teaching.

Self-regulation, ie, the ability to manage attention, emotions and impulses, as well as to pursue individual goals with perseverance, is not a skill usually associated with young children. However, school closures due to the pandemic and the increased usage of digital media by children have now shown how important these abilities are.

Studies suggest that people who demonstrated self-regulation as children go on to have, on average, higher incomes, better health and greater life satisfaction. They also show that the ability to exert self-regulation can already be trained in a targeted manner in childhood.

Self-regulation improves even with short training units

An international team from the Department of Economics at the University of Zurich (Switzerland) and from the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (Germany) used a controlled study in primary schools involving more than 500 first graders. The research team was able to show that even a short training unit led to a significant and sustainable improvement in self-regulation. The training did not just affect self-regulation abilities — the children had significantly improved reading ability and an improved focus on careless mistakes one year after the training, and were also considerably more likely to be admitted to a selective academic secondary school (Gymnasium) three years after the training.

“Our study has shown how the training of this skill can be explicitly embedded in primary school teaching at an early stage. An increase in self-regulation enables children to take on more responsibility for their own learning and to set goals on their own and work toward them,” said Ernst Fehr, professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Zurich.

Easily integrated into the regular timetable

The study authors designed the training units in an extremely cost-effective and time-saving manner, in such a way that they could be introduced in any primary school setting: the training unit lasted only five hours, and teachers participated in a three-hour training session and received completely developed teaching materials which they could integrate directly into the regular class schedule.

The training units were based on the MCII Strategy (mental contrasting with implementation intentions), which has already been the subject of excellent research studies in adults and older students. The teachers presented the abstract strategy in a playful manner using a picture book and the role model of a hurdle jumper. In a first step, the children imagined the positive effects of reaching a goal. They contrasted them with the obstacles that might face them on the way (mental contrasting). The children then identified specific behaviours to face the obstacles and develop ‘when-then’ plans (implementation intention).

Positive effect on society

“The special feature of our study is the long-term ripple effects that this short training unit can have. These effects benefit the child, and they are transferred in many ways to society as a whole over the course of the child’s life,” said first author Daniel Schunk, professor of public and behavioral economics at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz.

“The fact that early investments in such fundamental skills not only benefit the child alone, but also society, should be given more attention in education policy.”

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