Techcat project. how to evaluate and improve four dimensions of self-regulation in preeschool

Abstract

Executive functions are a family of top down mental processes that directly affect the well-being, academic achievement and quality of life of people, and they are developed at an early age. Childhood education (3-6 years old) is an appropriate context to evaluate and to promote the development of those skills but, at the same time, it is necessary to provide tools so that teachers can observe and select individual activities for each student in the classroom. Some researchers have demonstrated that many activities can improve inhibition control and working memory in little children (Diamond, 2016; Traverso, Viterbori & Usai, 2015) but there are few tasks designed specifically for the different dimensions of inhibition control, and there is little research on effects using technological devices. In the TECHCAT Project, a multidisciplinary team of researchers are designing technological solutions to help observe, assess and improve self-regulation skills in a preschool context. Additionally, we consider the role of individuals, school and family factors in moderating children`s development of early self-regulation skills. We use a pre-post design (1 experimental and 2 control groups) with 180 children of 3-6 years old from a preschool in Malaga (Spain). In this paper, we show the characteristics of the experimental design (evaluated skills, standardized test, specific tasks, etc.), and we show results on the design process of the self-regulation tasks using adapted and original tasks: 15 motor inhibition tasks, 11 verbal inhibition tasks, 5 emotional inhibition tasks, and 7 delay reward tasks.