A Prospective Investigation of Representation, Regulation, and the Transition to Formal Schooling

发展和学习科学家越来越多地认识到，早期学校的成功与孩子们知道的东西一样多，也与他们如何知道有关。然而，科学家对早期学习和教育适应的基础过程的理解已经超过了我们对这些机制的理解。因此，促进所有儿童早期学业成功的努力受到阻碍。儿童的心理表征（即，关于自我和他人的信念）和自我调节功能（即，根据情境要求控制情绪、行为和生理的能力）是积极发展和问题发展的中心机制。然而，代表性和监管过程对早期学校成功的个人和互动贡献值得进一步澄清。儿童的自我和他人表征以及自我调节能力对于他们成功地驾驭同伴、教师和学习世界至关重要。 此外，代表制度和管理制度构成了核心机制，通过这些机制，家庭中的经验学习可以转移到学校环境中。这项调查将追溯整个学前阶段的代表和监管系统的发展和组织，以澄清他们的个人和互动的早期学习和学校适应的贡献。 本研究采用对父母、儿童和亲子互动的年度观察，沿着儿童教师的同步报告，将跟踪240名来自不同背景的4岁儿童（即，50%的贫困; 50%的西班牙裔，30%的黑人，15%的白色;变量暴露于压力和逆境）过渡到二年级。措施将评估跨多个系统的表征和调节过程，包括认知，情感，行为和生理水平的分析，以1）跟踪整个早期学年的表征和调节过程的发展，2）评估其对教育适应的个人和互动贡献，以及3）澄清是否以及如何环境因素，如父母教养，种族，收入和逆境，影响预期的关系之间的代表，监管，并过渡到正规学校教育。这项调查将完善和扩大我们的理解儿童的早期学习和适应跟踪模式的连续性和变化的内部和整个代表和监管系统在早期学年。在这样做的时候，这项研究将有助于我们了解儿童如何学习，并通过推广，创新的努力，促进早期学习和教育能力，特别是在儿童谁是在不成比例的风险为学校失败的贫困，种族或逆境暴露的功能。向学校的过渡是一个独特的时期，容易受到发展影响，无论是好是坏，对青年的长期学习和成功具有强大的影响。通过澄清背景，代表性，监管和教育调整之间的相互作用，本次调查将阐明教育风险和弹性，将告知文化和上下文敏感的努力，以促进儿童的安全通过这一至关重要的发展过渡的途径。

Developmental and learning scientists increasingly acknowledge that early school success is as much about what children know as it is about how they come to know it. Yet scientists' appreciation for the processes that underlie early learning and educational adaptation has outpaced our understanding of these mechanisms. As a result, efforts to foster early school success for all children have been hampered. Children's mental representations (i.e., beliefs about self and other) and self-regulatory functioning (i.e., abilities to control emotions, behaviors, and physiology in accordance with contextual demands) are central mechanisms of both positive and problematic development. However, the individual and interactive contributions of representational and regulatory processes to early school success warrant further clarification. Children's self- and other-representations and their abilities to self-regulate are essential to their successful navigation of the worlds of peers, teachers, and learning. Moreover, representational and regulatory systems constitute core mechanisms by which experiential learning in the family transfers to the school setting. This investigation will trace the development and organization of representational and regulatory systems across the preschool period to clarify their individual and interactive contributions to early learning and school adjustment. Employing annual observations of parents, children, and parent-child interaction along with concurrent reports from children's teachers, this study will follow 240 4-year-old children from diverse backgrounds (i.e., 50% poverty; 50% Hispanic, 30% Black, and 15% White; variable exposure to stress and adversity) across the transition into second grade. Measures will assess representational and regulatory processes across multiple systems, including cognitive, emotional, behavioral, and physiological levels of analysis, to 1) trace the development of representational and regulatory processes across the early school years, 2) evaluate their individual and interactive contribution to educational adaptation, and 3) clarify if and how contextual factors, such as parenting, ethnicity, income and adversity, influence expected relations between representation, regulation, and the transition to formal schooling.This investigation will refine and expand our understanding of children's early learning and adaptation by tracing patterns of continuity and change within and across representational and regulatory systems across the early school years. In so doing, this research will contribute to our understanding of how children learn and, by extension, to innovative efforts that foster early learning and educational competence, particularly among children who are at disproportionate risk for school failure as a function of poverty, ethnicity, or adversity exposure. The transition to school constitutes a unique period of vulnerability to developmental influence, for better or worse, with powerful implications for youths' long term learning and success. By clarifying the interactions among context, representation, regulation and educational adjustment, this investigation will elucidate pathways of educational risk and resilience that will inform culturally and contextually sensitive efforts to facilitate children's safe passage across this critically important developmental transition.