Abstract
Children's behavioral self-regulation and executive function (EF; including attentional or cognitive flexibility, working memory, and inhibitory control) are strong predictors of academic achievement. The present study examined the psychometric properties of a measure of behavioral self-regulation called the Head-Toes-Knees-Shoulders (HTKS) by assessing construct validity, including relations to EF measures, and predictive validity to academic achievement growth between prekindergarten and kindergarten. In the fall and spring of prekindergarten and kindergarten, 208 children (51% enrolled in Head Start) were assessed on the HTKS, measures of cognitive flexibility, working memory (WM), and inhibitory control, and measures of emergent literacy, mathematics, and vocabulary. For construct validity, the HTKS was significantly related to cognitive flexibility, working memory, and inhibitory control in prekindergarten and kindergarten. For predictive validity in prekindergarten, a random effects model indicated that the HTKS significantly predicted growth in mathematics, whereas a cognitive flexibility task significantly predicted growth in mathematics and vocabulary. In kindergarten, the HTKS was the only measure to significantly predict growth in all academic outcomes. An alternative conservative analytical approach, a fixed effects analysis (FEA) model, also indicated that growth in both the HTKS and measures of EF significantly predicted growth in mathematics over four time points between prekindergarten and kindergarten. Results demonstrate that the HTKS involves cognitive flexibility, working memory, and inhibitory control, and is substantively implicated in early achievement, with the strongest relations found for growth in achievement during kindergarten and associations with emergent mathematics.
Highlights
We examined how well a measure of behavioral self-regulation tapped individual components of executive function (EF) and how it predicted gains in academic achievement compared to these other EF measures
We looked at multilevel models predicting Head-Toes-KneesShoulders task (HTKS) scores with the four EF measures at each wave, controlling for child age, parent education, gender, Head Start status, and English Language Learner status
The consistent significant finding for the HTKS and EF tasks and mathematics suggests that, during these early years, children who improved on measures of behavioral self-regulation and EF demonstrated the most growth in mathematics
Summary
Self-regulation has been established as a key mechanism associated with a variety of outcomes including school readiness (Blair and Razza, 2007; McClelland et al, 2007a; Morrison et al, 2010), academic achievement during childhood and adolescence (McClelland et al, 2006; Cameron Ponitz et al, 2009; Duckworth et al, 2010; Li-Grining et al, 2010), and longterm health and educational outcomes (Moffitt et al, 2011; McClelland et al, 2013). Given the multiple cognitive components involved in behavioral self-regulation, such as cognitive flexibility, working memory, and inhibitory control, measuring these skills during early childhood is challenging (Carlson, 2005; Cameron Ponitz et al, 2008; Caughy et al, 2014), and until recently, there have been few reliable and valid measures of these skills. The present study examined how a structured observation of behavioral self-regulation, the Head-Toes-KneesShoulders task (HTKS), was related to traditional executive function (EF) measures of cognitive flexibility, working memory, and inhibitory control. We tested the predictive validity of these direct assessments for growth in academic achievement over four time points between preschool and kindergarten
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