Academic Performance of Children with Social-Emotional Difficulties: Examining the Role of Self-Regulation

Student with social-emotional difficulties are at increased risk for many adverse outcomes, including school dropout, serious mental health concerns, justice-involved behavior, and decreased quality of life. Thus, considerable attention needs to be directed toward identifying ways to bolster resilience and mitigate these risks for these students. Research suggests that self-regulation skills, including attention, inhibitory control and emotion regulation, are critical for success across a variety of areas including academic performance; however, there are many questions about which specific facets of self-regulation are most critical for academic performance more broadly as well as in specific areas like reading and mathematics. Moreover, most of the prior literature has focused on early childhood, overlooking the critical learning opportunities in early elementary school. Little is also known about the impact of these factors for higher risk students with clear social-emotional difficulties. As such, this study utilized an integrative theoretical framework of self-regulation to examine how self-regulation factors influence academic performance, specifically for early elementary students with social-emotional difficulties. The student sample consisted of 129 first and second grade students nominated by 68 teachers for a self-regulation intervention. Using baseline data collected as part of a federally-funded study, multilevel modeling was used to determine the extent to which various cognitive and emotional mechanisms of self-regulation were associated with teacher-rated academic performance, reading proficiency, and mathematics proficiency, after controlling for gender and socioeconomic status. Results indicated that attention, inhibitory control, and emotion regulation were significant predictors of teacher-rated academic performance. Attention was the only significant predictor of reading proficiency and inhibitory control was the only significant predictor of mathematics proficiency. Results also indicated that attention was the strongest predictor of teacher-rated academic performance and reading proficiency, whereas inhibitory control was the strongest predictor of mathematics performance. Socioeconomic status, one of the control variables, also accounted for significant variance in reading and mathematics proficiency as indicated by report card grades but not teacher-rated academic performance. These results add to the evidence that self-regulation is important for school success, and functions in a manner expected for early elementary students with social-emotional difficulties. Results suggest that both self-regulation and academic performance should be considered in interventions to help foster positive outcomes for students, particularly those with social-emotional difficulties who are most in need.Doctor of Educatio