Social self-regulation: Exploring the relations between children' social relationships, academic self-regulation, and school performance

Abstract

I argue that the ability to monitor and regulate one's social interactions, or social self-regulation may in part explain the well-documented association between children's performance at school and their social competence. Research about social relationships has identified that many of the same overarching social cognitive factors found to be important for regulation of academic work are also important for social relationships. These similarities suggest that there may be an underlying process that is shared for individual's self-regulation of academic and social engagement. The apparent parallels between domains are illustrated through the mapping of research regarding children's social competence on to social cognitive models of academic self-regulation. Future directions for research, based on these theoretical speculations, are presented.