'And when they woke up...they were monkeys!' Using classroom games to improve preschooler's behavioral self-regulation

Behavioral self-regulation has emerged as an important predictor of academic success as early as preschool. Few studies, however, have examined ways to improve children's behavioral self-regulation in preschool, prior to formal school entry. This dissertation includes two studies examining a pilot intervention using classroom games to improve behavioral self-regulation with 65 prekindergarteners. Study 1 examined if participating in the intervention group significantly improved behavioral self-regulation and early academic outcomes. Results indicated that participation in the intervention predicted significant gains on a direct measure of behavioral self-regulation for children beginning the year with low levels of these skills. Additionally, intervention participation predicted significant reading gains in the overall sample of children. Study 2 examined quantitative and qualitative factors related to intervention effectiveness. Results suggest that low maternal education significantly predicted that children would begin the year with low behavioral self-regulation and thus be in the group most likely to benefit from intervention participation. Moreover, qualitative analyses indicated that children from low-income families had more difficulty paying attention and exhibited more off-task behaviors during intervention sessions, which may have contributed to the smaller behavioral self-regulation gains they experienced in comparison to their more-advantaged peers. Together these studies support the effectiveness of a pilot behavioral self-regulation intervention and provide implications for future applications of the intervention, including increasing the number of intervention sessions and embedding behavioral self-regulation activities into prekindergarten classrooms as a means of facilitating academic achievement.