Developing self-regulation at school

Excel­lent arti­cle in the New York Times on learn­ing, self-reg­u­la­tion and exec­u­tive fuunctions:

The School Issue: Preschool: Can the Right Kinds of Play Teach Self-Con­trol? (New York Times)

- “Over the last few years, a new buzz phrase has emerged among schol­ars and sci­en­tists who study ear­ly-child­hood devel­op­ment, a phrase that sounds more as if it belongs in the board­room than the class­room: exec­u­tive func­tion. Orig­i­nal­ly a neu­ro­science term, it refers to the abil­i­ty to think straight: to order your thoughts, to process infor­ma­tion in a coher­ent way, to hold rel­e­vant details in your short-term mem­o­ry, to avoid dis­trac­tions and men­tal traps and focus on the task in front of you. And recent­ly, cog­ni­tive psy­chol­o­gists have come to believe that exec­u­tive func­tion, and specif­i­cal­ly the skill of self-reg­u­la­tion, might hold the answers to some of the most vex­ing ques­tions in edu­ca­tion today.”

- “The abil­i­ty of young chil­dren to con­trol their emo­tion­al and cog­ni­tive impuls­es, it turns out, is a remark­ably strong indi­ca­tor of both short-term and long-term suc­cess, aca­d­e­m­ic and otherwise.”

A tru­ly excel­lent arti­cle, high­ly rec­om­mend­ed read­ing. The only aspect lack­ing is the absence of coverage/ analy­sis of train­ing-based alter­na­tives to devel­op­ing self-reg­u­la­tion, such as med­i­ta­tion and com­put­er­ized cog­ni­tive train­ing, which can help address some of the issues raised in the arti­cle (lim­it­ed scal­a­bil­i­ty, dif­fi­cul­ty in iso­lat­ing influ­en­tial vari­ables). We cov­ered this in-depth in our book inter­view with Michael Posner.