Assessing child self-regulation: A review of ecological and structured approaches.

The extent to which developmental science has mapped associations between cognitive, academic and socio-emotional functioning; caregiver reports and non-participant observation of young children was examined. Initially, 88 studies comprising over 300 effects were identified. The relationships between outcome measures and research design was described. Findings show that recurrent associations between task performance, behavioral report and naturalistic observation appear in this literature. The most frequently occurring comparisons in school settings were those between children’s disruptive-aggressive behavior, on-task/off-task behavior, prosocial behavior, externalizing problems, prosocial skills and early math and language achievement. In home settings, those between children’s positive/negative affect, engagement, compliance, temperament, cognitive and motor development were most common. Despite conceptual overlap, limited access to correlational data and between-study heterogeneity hinders cross-sample comparisons. Opportunities to accumulate evidence on the directions, magnitudes and potential sources of variance in these associations are discussed.