Exploring Variability in Young Children's Behavioral Regulation: New Evidence from Wearable Devices to Inform Educational Practice

Andrew Koepp

In order to learn, children must be able to focus their attention and inhibit impulsive behavior. Individual children display a range of these skills in the preschool classroom, but when and why a child?s regulation varies is poorly understood despite its importance to learning and classroom management. To address this gap, Andrew will develop and apply a method for assessing children?s behavioral regulation across classroom activities and across school days. He will extract movement-based indicators of children?s behavioral regulation from wearable accelerometers and use machine learning methods to identify and refine additional indicators. He will validate these new indicators against measures of cognitive and behavioral regulation as well as early academic skills and problem behaviors. He will then examine variability in children?s regulation using repeated observations of children?s behavioral regulation across classroom activities and across school days. Finally, he will begin to examine what factors predict variability in children?s behavioral regulation. This knowledge will help educators understand how to support young children?s behavioral regulation for classroom management and individual learning.

About Andrew Koepp

Andrew is a doctoral candidate in Human Development and Family Sciences at the University of Texas at Austin. His work examines children?s self-regulation: new ways to measure it, how it matters for later development, and how adults can help children develop it. He is especially interested in how young children learn to manage their attention and behavior in educational settings. In his dissertation, Andrew examines how researchers can use wearable technology to understand children?s learning-related behaviors in the classroom setting. He collected data for his dissertation with support from a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Award from the National Science Foundation. In his other work, Andrew examines how school and family contexts shape children?s development, both in the United States and in Brazil. Andrew?s work appears in Child Development and Development Science. He holds degrees in Human Development from Vanderbilt University (B.S.), Harvard University (Ed.M.), and the University of Texas at Austin (M.A.).