An investigation of emotion regulation, social skills, and academic readiness in low-income preschool children

The purpose of this study was to explore empirical relationships among social skills, emotion regulation and academic readiness, and to examine the role of emotion regulation as a mediator between social skills and academic readiness in low-income preschool children.; This study used pre-existing data obtained from the Early Head Start (EHS) pre-kindergarten follow up study conducted by The Catholic University of America. The pre-kindergarten follow-up study is part of a national, longitudinal, randomized investigation of EHS. The participants are 83 preschool aged children from low-income families. Trained examiners assessed children's emotion regulation using the Leiter International Performance Scale-Revised Examiner Rating Scale; and measured their academic readiness using the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test 3rd Edition or the Test de Vocabulario Imagenes Peabody, the Boehm Test of Basic Concepts 3rd Edition (Boehm-3), and both the Applied Problems and Letter-Word Identification subtests from the Woodcock Johnson- Revised. The child's preschool teacher assessed social skills using the Teacher Questionnaire About Child Behavior.; Sociocultural cognitive theory purports that learning takes place through social interactions. Emotional competence theory proposes that emotional regulation facilitates children's social competence and plays an important role in learning. Both theory and previous research provide a strong foundation to support the role of emotion regulation as a mediator between social skills and academic readiness in low-income preschool children; yet, this study is the first to test this hypothesis.; The findings establish partial evidence for this study's primary hypothesis, in that emotion regulation was found to mediate the relationship between social skills and the Boehm-3, a measure of language concepts. Emotion regulation also moderated the relationship between social skills and the Boehm-3.; Consistent with findings from previous research regarding the academic readiness of low-income children, the mean scores on the readiness measures for the children in this sample were approximately one standard deviation below the national mean. Statistically significant differences were found between the mean scores for male and female participants for some of the readiness measures. Significant correlations occurred among the four academic readiness measures, demonstrating a positive relationship between various aspects of readiness: early literacy, numeracy, vocabulary and language concepts.