Recent research has examined complex relationships between parent and child characteristics and the development of children’s social-emotional competencies. The over-arching objective of the current study was to compare differential patterns of predictability between the individual social-emotional competencies of cooperation, responsibility, and independence, and a social-emotional competency composite, to parental warmth...
Children who have multiple family risk factors are at increased risk for poor developmental outcomes, including poor academic achievement. The present study focused on charting the pathways through which early family risk – as indexed by ethnic minority status, low maternal education, low family income, and chronic maternal depressive symptoms...
Early behavioral regulation has been identified as an important component of school readiness, yet few easy-to-administer measures exist that directly assess this skill in young children outside of the United States (U.S.). In this dissertation, two studies were conducted to examine the reliability and validity of a direct measure of...
The present study examined if having an older sibling was significantly related to stronger selfregulation and achievement, in a sample of 74 preschool children participating in a selfregulation intervention. It was hypothesized that children with an older sibling in the fall would have higher self-regulation and achievement scores than children...
Increasing numbers of children are entering kindergarten without the behavioral skills needed to cope with the demands of the classroom environment. Moreover, a number of studies have documented that young children's behavioral regulation (including attention, working memory, and inhibitory control skills) plays an important role in later academic achievement (McClelland,...
Behavioral self-regulation has emerged as an important predictor of academic success as early as preschool. Few studies, however, have examined ways to improve children's behavioral self-regulation in preschool, prior to formal school entry. This dissertation includes two studies examining a pilot intervention using classroom games to improve behavioral self-regulation with...
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Megan M. McClelland
Behavioral self-regulation has emerged as an important predictor of
The present study investigated how the home literacy environment and children's learning-related social skills independently and interactively predicted early literacy skills in a sample of 72 children. Hierarchical regressions revealed that the home literacy environment predicted children's early reading and vocabulary skills, when controlling for maternal education and child age....
This project aimed to address the topic of children with disabilities through a well-researched children’s book. Dancing with my friend Maddie is a children’s book that focuses on a friendship between Claire, a typically developing first grader, and Maddie, a first grader with Down syndrome. Research has shown that addressing...
Executive functions (including attentional shifting/flexibility, working memory, and inhibitory control) are strong predictors of children's early school success (Blair & Razza, 2007; Espy et al., 2004). The current study explored questions related to measurement of executive functions in preschool-aged children. Convergent and predictive validity were assessed for two traditional executive...
The current study examined relations between temperamental reactivity at 6 months and social competence in first grade, including if emotion regulation at 54 months played a role as mediator and/or moderator between temperamental reactivity and social competence in first grade. Previous studies have shown that children who are high on...
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Megan M. McClelland
The current study examined relations between temperamental reactivity at