Do Friends Help or Hinder? Examining Co-regulation in Kindergarteners.

Abstract

Research has established the importance of self-regulation skills for young children’s academic success (e.g., McClelland et al., 2007), but more recent work has focused on co-regulation, or ways in which peer interactions impact students’ regulatory performance (e.g., Whitebread et al., 2007; McCaslin, 2009; Neitzel, 2009). The present studies examined ways in which children’s individual self-regulation abilities and peer relationships impact how they co-regulate with other students during a group self-regulation assessment and a collaborative problem-solving task, as well as how teacher decisions impact these interactions. One hundred fifty students aged 5 to 7 from 11 kindergarten classrooms were assessed on their individual self-regulation and academic achievement, as well as their peer nominations. During a subsequent visit, students were paired based on 1) their regulatory ability (low or high, relative to the class median) and 2) their friendship status (friends or non-friends, according to teacher nominations). Student pairs were videotaped completing an established measure of self-regulation/executive function called the Head-Toes-Knees-Shoulders (HTKS; Ponitz et al., 2009) and a challenging tangram puzzle task (Berhenke, 2013). The tangram task was coded for co-regulating behaviors. Finally, teachers completed surveys on their awareness of student regulatory skills and peer connections in the classroom, as well as the basis for their instructional decisions about student grouping in the classroom. Results revealed that regulatory pair type (e.g., High/High, Low/Low, Low/High) impacted students’ change in HTKS performance from individual to paired contexts, but peer status did not. Conversely, peer status impacted students’ success on the tangram task, but not regulatory pair type, providing evidence to support the importance of task type as a context affecting the group dynamic. Additionally, results showed a main effect of gender and a peer status by pair type interaction effect on one specific co-regulating behavior—preventative directing language. Finally, teacher surveys revealed that teachers are most concerned with separating behavior problems and least concerned with reinforcing existing friendships when making classroom grouping decisions. Teachers were found to be moderately accurate when assessing peer connections in the classroom. Implications for future research and opportunities for collaboration with educators are discussed.