Methodological Overlap in Early Childhood Education Self-Regulation Research: An Interdisciplinary Systematic Review

Young children’s self-regulation (SR) skills are linked to many important outcomes across the lifespan and school stakeholders widely agree that these skills should be prioritized in schools. Despite broad agreement about the importance of these skills, the diverse field of SR research is rife with a lack of clarity in both conceptual definitions and measurement with many different terms and definitions used interchangeably. With a systematic review of early childhood SR research in schools, we aimed to add to these efforts by cataloguing which SR variables researchers measure and the specific methodological choices made to capture such variables. Coders identified 319 peer-reviewed articles published between 2010–2020 that included a school-based measurement of self-regulation related constructs among children between 3- and 8-years. This revealed 11 distinct variable terms used widely in the literature to refer to SR related skills or characteristics and behavior problems was overwhelmingly the most frequent. Studies of many of these variables relied heavily on adult reports, usually teachers, and the use of multiple informants to measure variables was uncommon. Findings further highlight the conceptual clutter in SR research, point to possible points of empirical weaknesses in the measurement of these skills, and identify some methodological overlap in how variables are being operationalized in the literature.