The direction of associations

EF (in Study II referred to as self-regulation) is regarded as foundational (Blair & Raver, 2015; Cameron et al., 2012; McClelland & Cameron, 2019; McClelland & Cameron, 2012; McClelland et al., 2015) for a successful development of academic skills. Foundational skills are less visible cognitive processes that are often not explicit targets of instruction but are considered fundamental for learning in one or more content areas (McClelland & Cameron, 2019).

Two pathways through which EF may contribute to early literacy and math development can be distinguished. First, the ability to regulate attention and behavior allows children to benefit from learning opportunities that facilitate the development of early academic skills (Blair & Diamond, 2008; Blair & Raver, 2015; McClelland et al., 2014).

EF and self-regulation allow children to ignore irrelevant impulses and peer distractions, listen to and remember instructions, and switch attention from one activity to another in classroom situations. Second, EF may also be directly involved in academic skills (Blair, Knipe, &

Theoretical and empirical framework

Gamson, 2008; Blair & Raver, 2015; Bull & Lee, 2014; Cartwright, 2012). For example, inhibition may help children to ignore certain aspects of a mathematical problem (e.g., irrelevant contextual information from a word problem), good working memory may assist children in storing and retrieving information (e.g., partial results) during the problem-solving process, and shifting may aid the process of, for example, switching between different strategies to solve a problem (Bull

& Lee, 2014). Similarly, inhibition may help children with ignoring interfering stimuli when reading (e.g., other words or features on a page), shifting may aid children to flexibly switch between the meaning of a word and its structural features, and working memory may enable children to manage and coordinate elements of a sentence for effective comprehension (Cartwright, 2012).

Though it seems intuitive to assume that EF plays a causal role in the development of early literacy and mathematics, EF may not only set the stage for development in academic skills, but certain academic skills may also contribute to the development of EF, which in turn may spur further academic development, and so on.

The development and mastering of academic skills during early childhood constitutes a challenging and complex developmental task.

The repeated use of working memory, inhibition, and shifting during the course of this development suggest that children who practice academic skills may, at the same time, train EF (Clements et al., 2016). Children with good academic skills may seek out or be challenged with more advanced and complex academic activities and more often engage in academics compared to children with lower proficiency. Hence, children’s acquisition of high academic achievement and subsequent increase in complexity and frequency of academic activities may lead to more practice of EF skills compared to what is the case for children who do not, or inefficiently practice academic skills (Blair & Raver, 2015;

Clements et al., 2016).

Moreover, as outlined in paragraph 2.2.2, Vygotsky (Vygotsky, 1934/1986) reasoned that the internalization of children’s caregiver regulatory speech allows them to talk to themselves and monitor and modify their thoughts and behavior. Private speech is considered a domain-general system for verbal self-regulation (Lidstone, Meins, &

Fernyhough, 2011). As language develops during early childhood the child gains access to an increasingly growing number of internalized symbols and representations. A child’s vocabulary is representative of their symbolic repertoires and children who have larger vocabularies thus have more mental tools to regulate their behavior (Vallotton &

Ayoub, 2011). Hence, children’s EF may not only predict aspects of language, their language abilities (e.g., vocabulary) may also predict EF.

2.6.1.1 Prior research on bidirectionality

Awareness about possible bidirectional or reciprocal processes in development and the importance of investigating the direction of causal relations between EF or self-regulation and academic skills has been rising in recent years (Clements et al., 2016; McClelland & Cameron, 2019).

The most consistent evidence for bidirectionality has been found for mathematics and EF. A relatively high number of studies found that EF or self-regulation predicted math as well as vice versa in preschool and kindergarten children (Fuhs, Nesbitt, Farran, & Dong, 2014; Schmitt, Geldhof, Purpura, Duncan, & McClelland, 2017; Welsh, Nix, Blair, Bierman, & Nelson, 2010), although sometimes the relation became unidirectional with only self-regulation predicting mathematics at later time points (Fuhs et al., 2014; Schmitt et al., 2017) suggesting co-development among EF and mathematics early on, with patterns becoming more specific over time (McClelland & Cameron, 2019).

Results from studies investigating the direction of relations between self-regulation and language have been mixed with some recent studies

Theoretical and empirical framework

showing evidence for bidirectional relations (Cadima et al., 2018; Slot &

Von Suchodoletz, 2018) or a combination of uni- and bidirectional relations depending on the time and type of assessment (Bohlmann, Maier, & Palacios, 2015; Fuhs et al., 2014). Consistent across all of these studies, including a study by Fuhs and Day (2011), seems, however, that results included a significant pathway from language to EF or self-regulation across at least one of the time spans. An exception was a study by Weiland, Barata, and Yoshikawa (2014) who found that EF predicted language, but not the reverse. Also, Gooch, Thompson, Nash, Snowling, and Hulme (2016) did not find any evidence for reciprocity between EF and language in children 4 to 6 years. However, their sample included children with a wide range of language abilities including children at risk of dyslexia and or other concerns regarding their language development and may therefore not be representative of the typically developing population. Recently, Meixner, Warner, Lensing, Schiefele, and Elsner (2018) did find a significant path from EF to reading comprehension in first-graders and bidirectional relations between EF and reading comprehension for second and third graders. Taken together, these results suggest a relatively consistent pathway from language to self-regulation and EF, which is in line with Vygotsky’s socio-cultural development theory and the role of language in the development of self-regulation, as well as indications of a self-regulation to language pathway.

Finally, studies that have investigated the direction of associations between self-regulation and early literacy skills show a consistent pattern of a unidirectional pathway from self-regulation to early literacy, and not the reverse. However, the strength of this pathway is often weak (beta’s often below .20) and not consistently present across time (Fuhs et al., 2014; McKinnon & Blair, 2018; Schmitt et al., 2017; Welsh et al., 2010).

One limitation of prior work on this topic is that, with a few recent exceptions (Hernández et al., 2018; McKinnon & Blair, 2018), none of these studies have looked at the direction of relations between

self-regulation and academic skills when children make the transition between kindergarten and first grade. The transition to first grade is accompanied by a change in educational context from informal to education that is more formal (e.g., sitting still behind a desk for longer periods of time, listening to the teacher, raising a hand before asking a question, focusing on and complete a given task, more instruction and less free play overall) as well as an increase in focus on academic skills.

This transition may put a high demand on children’s self-regulation in addition to the heightened demand on self-regulatory skills that can be expected because of the increase in a focus on learning academic skills.

This may especially be the case in the Norwegian early childhood education context because the transition from a play-based kindergarten to formal schooling may require extra self-regulation in order to cope with the shift from free play to instructional activities.

Moreover, most studies have estimated separate models for early literacy and mathematics. Combined models may provide valuable information on whether the effects are robust when controlling for one another.

Schmitt et al. (2017) did include both literacy and mathematics in one model, but this study did not include the transition to first grade.

Recently, McKinnon and Blair (2018) published a study where they included early reading skills (letter-word identification) and mathematics in one model and found bidirectional relations for mathematics across the transition to first grade, but only a weak (ȕ = .09) unidirectional relation from EF to early reading skills.

The aim of Study II was to get a better understanding of the direction of associations between self-regulation and early literacy and math skills when children transition from a play-based kindergarten to formal education in first grade. More specifically, is this relationship best represented as bidirectional (reciprocal associations between variables), unidirectional (self-regulation predicts academic skill or vice versa), or is the association likely better explained by other variables not present in the model (no coupling in any direction)?

Theoretical and empirical framework