Influences on Self-Regulated Learning in Low-Income Children: Examining the Role of Private and Social Speech as Self-Regulation Tools

Self-regulated learning (SRL) allows children to become autonomous learners through facilitating their active planning, monitoring, and evaluation of their performance in the classroom. Low-income children have been found to exhibit lower SRL abilities compared to middle-class children. SRL is linked to a number of long-term academic outcomes, and thus, understanding what contributes to this ability is essential for intervention. One potential mediator of children’s emerging SRL abilities is language. Social Constructivist Theory provides a lens to view this relationship between language and SRL, denoting the importance of both the physical and social dimensions of the classroom when examining cognitive development. This mixed methods study included observations in five Head Start preschool classrooms, examining children’s use of speech (private and social speech) and SRL behaviors (independent and social regulation) throughout daily classroom activities.

Children’s proximity to social partners (solitary, dyad, small group, large group) impacted children’s use of speech and SRL. In particular, children’s use of private speech was negatively associated with the number of social partners in close proximity, while use of social speech peaked when children were proximal to a small number of peers. Children’s engagement in independent regulation was most infrequent when proximal to a large group of peers, and social regulation peaked when children were in a dyad or small group of peers. Additionally, a series of path analyses assessed the relationship between children’s global vocabulary and SRL as mediated by their use of speech. Results revealed differences between two contexts, play and instruction, suggesting that the role of vocabulary on SRL changes with the current demands of the environment. Finally, a qualitative content analysis was conducted on field notes and a research journal that were completed throughout the observational period. Three overall themes were found: children’s purposes for using private speech, children’s purposes for using social speech, and teachers’ modeling of verbal strategies to children. Overall, the findings of the present study yield important implications for the role of language in implementing SRL, as well as how to structure both the physical and social environment of the classroom to best promote particular speech and SRL behaviors.