- Title
- Self-regulation and academic performance in early childhood :an East London study
- Creator
- Martin, Glynnis Michelle
- Subject
- Self-control in children Early childhood education Child rearing
- Date Issued
- 2018
- Date
- 2018
- Type
- Thesis
- Type
- Doctoral
- Type
- PhD
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/10353/10949
- Identifier
- vital:35969
- Description
- Previous research studies have identified various factors as influential in whether one is successful in obtaining the education necessary for effective living within a given society. Early academic performance is consistently linked to later academic performance, which in turn, relates to physical, mental and even financial health outcomes in adulthood. The recognition that competence with the demands of learning and socialization can set up cycles of success or failure, lead to much research interest directed at the key role of self-regulation, as an executive function skill, in early academic performance. Despite this growing body of research, a comprehensive conceptual model for the predictive role and interaction between complex executive functions, socio-emotional competence, learning aptitudes and visuomotor skills, as predictors in early academic success, is still lacking. Knowledge of the integrated functioning of these predictors in the South African context is particularly scarce. This research was designed to address these knowledge gaps through an exploratory descriptive and causal-comparative study. Purposive, non-probability sampling was used to select a group of 183 Grade 1 learners from a low socio-economic area of East London in South Africa. Ages ranged from 6 to 8 years (M = 6.78, SD = 0.54), whilst 40% were female and 60% were male. Predictors of academic success were measured at the start of the first academic term, and a parent-report measure was used to measure socio-emotional competencies. Second term school report cards were used to measure mid-year academic achievement. Relationships between each predictor and their relationships to academic performance were explored through Pearson product-moment correlation coefficients. vii One-way Analysis of Variance with post-hoc Scheffé tests was used to explore differences between groups of Gender, Age, Home Language, Maternal Marital Status, Maternal Age and whether the grade was being Repeated or not. Two priori conceptual models of the relationships between the predictor variables and academic performance were estimated through Structural Equation Modeling. Results indicate various significant relationships between each predictor and specific aspects of academic performance. Visuomotor skills showed the strongest correlation to academic performance, followed by learning abilities and complex executive functions. Social-emotional competence was not practically significantly related to any of the factors and appeared to affect academic performance primarily through a significant relationship to complex executive functions. Interestingly, results indicate subtypes of visuomotor skills that are significantly correlated to the complex executive, as also highly correlated with academic performance. Precision tasks that were not related to complex executive function, was not significantly related to academic performance. Results furthermore identify the significant influence of caregiver factors on visuomotor skills and that of home language on learning abilities. Regression analysis results confirm a significant mediating effect of learning aptitudes in relation to the effects of complex executive function and visuomotor skills on academic performance. Model comparison supported this mediation-model as superior to a no-mediation model in predicting academic success in Grade 1. This study expands on the understanding of the role of the common executive function in relation to factors associated with crystallized intelligence, visuomotor skills and socio-emotional competencies in predicting early academic success. This study presents an innovative integrated mediation model of the relationships between the identified predictors in relation to academic success.
- Format
- 241 leaves
- Format
- Publisher
- University of Fort Hare
- Publisher
- Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities
- Language
- English
- Rights
- University of Fort Hare
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UFH Department of Psychology
| Thumbnail | File | Description | Size | Format | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| View Details Download | SOURCE1 | GMartin Phd 2018.pdf | 2 MB | Adobe Acrobat PDF | View Details Download |