Oregon Live – Amy Wang
“The best predictor of kids’ academic success might not be how many letters they recognize by age 3 or how high they can count by age 4, but how willing they are to persist at challenging tasks and how well they plan ahead, pay attention, remember and follow instructions, and control their impulses and emotions. These so-called executive functions, also known collectively as self-regulation or self-control, have long been considered a key life skill. Self-control is among seven essential life skills taught to children in the national Mind in the Making project, and the importance of self-regulation is a key theme in “Age of Opportunity,” a book about the adolescent brain published in September by Laurence Steinberg, a Temple University psychology professor who is a leading expert on adolescence. Now an Oregon State University study published in the current issue of Early Childhood Research Quarterly indicates that self-regulation can be taught to children as young as preschool age and that such intervention can produce gains in areas such as math achievement, with the most disadvantaged kids making the biggest gains.”(more)