Self-Regulation and School Success

Some children fare better academically than others, even when family background and school and teacher quality are controlled for (Rivkin, Hanushek, & Kain, 2005 ). Variance in performance that persists when situational variables are held constant suggests that individual differences play an important role in determining whether children thrive or fail in school. In this chapter, we review research on individual differences in self-regulation and their relation to school success. Disciplines Psychology This book chapter is available at ScholarlyCommons: http://repository.upenn.edu/psychology_papers/3 208 Some children fare better academically than others, even when family background and school and teacher quality are controlled for (Rivkin, Hanushek, & Kain, 2005 ). Variance in performance that persists when situational variables are held constant suggests that individual dif erences play an important role in determining whether children thrive or fail in school. In this chapter, we review research on individual dif erences in selfregulation and their relation to school success. Historically, research on individual dif erences that bear on school success has focused on general intelligence. A century of empirical evidence has now unequivocally established that intelligence, dei ned as the “ability to understand complex ideas, to adapt ef ectively to the environment, to learn from experience, to engage in various forms of reasoning, to overcome obstacles by taking thought” (Neisser et al., 1996 , p. 77) has a monotonic, positive relationship with school success (Gottfredson, 2004; Kuncel, Ones, & Sackett, 2010 ; Lubinski, 2009 ). In contrast, the relation between school success and temperamental dif erences among children has only recently attracted serious attention from researchers. Temperament is typically dei ned as “constitutionally based individual dif erences in reactivity and self-regulation, in the domains of af ect, activity, and attention” (Rothbart & Bates, 2006 , p. 100). While assumed to have a substantial genetic basis, temperament is also inl uenced by experience and demonstrates both stability and change over time. h is chapter focuses on self-regulation because it is the dimension of temperament most reliably related to school success. We address several related questions: What is the relation between self-regulation and both educational attainment (e.g., years of education, high school completion) and Chapter 10 Self-Regulation and School Success Angela Lee Duckworth University of Pennsylvania Stephanie M. Carlson University of Minnesota Self-Regulation and School Success 209 achievement (e.g., teacher-assigned course grades, standardized achievement test scores)? Does self-regulation also predict job performance, health, and other dimensions of success in life? Finally, what progress has been made in deliberately cultivating self-regulatory competence in children? Naming, Defining, and Measuring Self-Regulation We dei ne self-regulation as the voluntary control of attentional, emotional, and behavioral impulses in the service of personally valued goals and standards. By specifying that goals and standards are personally valued, we do not mean that they are necessarily seli sh. On the contrary, self-regulation is required to adhere to goals and standards that are altruistic in nature (e.g., sharing a prize rather than keeping it all for oneself) as well as those that are not (e.g., receiving a larger treat for oneself rather than a smaller one). For clarity’s sake, we point out that we use the term “self-regulation” interchangeably with the terms self-control, self-discipline, and willpower – and suggest that the terms impulsiveness and impulsivity connote dei cits in self-regulatory competence. Of particular relevance to this chapter, we consider selfregulation to be coextensive with ef ortful control, a well-recognized aspect of temperament in children that has been dei ned as “the ability to inhibit a dominant response to perform a subdominant response, to detect errors, and to engage in planning” (Rothbart & Rueda, 2005 , p. 169). Crucially, in situations that tax self-regulation, at least two mutually exclusive responses are possible, and the weaker (i.e., subdominant) response is preferred to the stronger (i.e., dominant) impulse. While self-regulation is most certainly multi-dimensional in the sense of involving more than one distinct psychological process (Duckworth & Kern, 2011 ; Whiteside & Lynam, 2001 ; Zimmerman & Kitsantas, 2005 ), we suggest it is nevertheless a coherent higher-order construct (de Ridder, Lensvelt-Mulders, Finkenauer, Stok, & Baumeister, 2012; Heatherton & Wagner, 2011 ) and a proi table target of study alongside its component processes. In taxonomies of childhood temperament, self-regulation is typically distinguished from two factors that are more reactive and less voluntary in nature: negative emotionality (shyness, fear, sadness, etc.) and surgency (activity level, sensation seeking, positive emotion) (Rothbart & Rueda, 2005 ). h e location of self-regulation in omnibus taxonomies of adult personality is debatable (Revelle, 1997 ). At present, the most widely accepted organization for adult personality distinguishes i ve families of traits (the Big Five): Conscientiousness, Agreeableness, Extraversion, Emotional Stability, and Openness to Experience. Many psychologists consider self-regulation Duckworth and Carlson 210 to be identical – or nearly so – with Big Five Conscientiousness (Caspi & Shiner, 2006 ; Moi tt et al., 2011). Others have proposed that self-regulation relates to other Big Five factors as well. For instance, Whiteside and Lynam ( 2001 ) suggest that the tendency to think and plan before acting and the regulation of behavior in the face of frustration are both aspects of Big Five Conscientiousness, whereas the regulation of urgent, negative emotions corresponds to Big Five Emotional Stability, and the tendency to have strong impulses toward risky, exciting activities (which makes selfregulation more dii cult) relates to Big Five Extraversion. Additionally, in children, the regulation of impulses in the context of interactions with peers and adults has clear conceptual links to Big Five Agreeableness (Tsukayama, Duckworth, & Kim, 2011 ). Executive functioning overlaps conceptually with the temperament trait of ef ortful control, though the scientii c investigation of these two constructs tends to be segregated, with neuroscientists primarily interested in executive functioning and temperament researchers primarily concerned with ef ortful control (Rothbart & Rueda, 2005 ). Rueda, Posner, and Rothbart ( 2005 ) have argued that executive function (and in particular, the executive attention network, which monitors and resolves conl ict between other brain networks) and ef ortful control are concepts representing dif erent methodological approaches to studying self-regulation of behavior (see also Checa, Rodriguez-Bailon, & Rueda, 2008 ). Children who do better on direct tasks of executive function tend to be rated signii cantly higher in ef ortful control by their parents (Chang & Burns, 2005 ; Gerardi-Caulton, 2000 ; Gonzalez, Fuentes, Carranza, & Estevez, 2001 ; Rothbart, Ellis, Rueda, & Posner, 2003 ; Simonds, 2007 ). However, a recent meta-analysis suggests that in general, correlations between individual executive function tasks and questionnaire measures of self-control are small in size (e.g., r = .14 with informant-report ratings; Duckworth & Kern, 2011 ). Even when batteries of executive function tasks are used to improve reliability and validity (Carlson, Faja, & Beck, in press ), associates with informant ratings are only moderate in magnitude, suggesting that executive function is not the only contributing factor to self-controlled behavior. Historical Interest in Self-Regulation and School Success h e idea that self-regulation plays an important role in the classroom is not new. In a series of lectures addressed to Boston schoolteachers, William James ( 1899 ) stated that in “schoolroom work” there is inevitably “a large Self-Regulation and School Success 211 mass of material that must be dull and unexciting” (pp. 104–105). Further, “there is unquestionably a great native variety among individuals in the type of their attention. Some of us are naturally scatter-brained, and others follow easily a train of connected thoughts without temptation to swerve aside to other subjects” (p. 112). It follows, James argued, that a dispositional advantage in the capacity for sustained attention is tremendously benei cial in the classroom. Improbably, pioneers of intelligence testing were among the i rst to recognize the importance of self-regulation to academic performance. Binet and Simon ( 1916 ), architect of the i rst modern intelligence test, noted that performance in school: admits of other things than intelligence; to succeed in his studies, one must have qualities which depend on attention, will, and character; for example a certain docility, a regularity of habits, and especially continuity of ef ort . A child, even if intelligent, will learn little in class if he never listens, if he spends his time in playing tricks, in giggling, in playing truant. (p. 254, italics added) David Wechsler ( 1943 ), who several decades later helped usher intelligence testing into widespread clinical and educational practice, made similar observations about the unfortunate neglect of “non-intellective” factors which, in conjunction with general intelligence, determine intelligent behavior: When our scales measure the non-intellective as well as the intellectual factors in intelligence, they will more nearly measure what in actual life corresponds to intelligent behavior. Under these circumstances they might not be so ei cient in selecting individuals likely to succeed in Latin and geometry, but they should do a much better job in selecting those destined