Reevaluating self-regulation: the overlooked key to boosting student success

Professor Martin Westwell highlights the critical role of self-regulation in learning, arguing it should be a deliberate focus in classrooms to improve academic and social outcomes based on recent research and interventions.

Self-regulation is often treated as a side issue in education, but Professor Martin Westwell argues that it may be one of the most important drivers of learning. In a column for Teacher magazine, Westwell, chief executive of the South Australian Department for Education, says schools tend to focus first on curriculum, knowledge and instruction, yet pupils also need the capacity to pause, persist and resist immediate impulses if they are to learn well.

That broader view is supported by research. A meta-analysis published in Psychological Bulletin, drawing on 150 studies and more than 215,000 children, found that stronger self-regulation in pre-school was linked with better academic performance, stronger school engagement and more positive social outcomes later on. The authors stressed that these were associations rather than proof of causation, but the pattern was consistent across a wide range of studies.

Westwell says the term is sometimes narrowed in schools to emotional regulation or recovery from dysregulation, but the research literature uses it more widely to mean the ability to hold back dominant impulses in thought, feeling and behaviour. That can include waiting before answering, staying with a difficult task or resisting distraction. It is not the same as compliance, and a quiet pupil is not necessarily a self-regulating one.

He points to evidence that self-control can be taught and strengthened. One study of a two-year intervention with boys from disadvantaged communities in Montreal found no early gains in IQ or attainment, but later improvements in grades, repetition rates, special education placement, educational achievement and employment. The researchers said the programme combined social skills and self-control training, so the gains cannot be credited to self-regulation alone, but the randomised design suggests the intervention changed life chances in a meaningful way.

That has direct implications for classrooms. In mathematics, pupils may need to stop themselves from applying the last method they used before checking what a new problem requires. In writing, they may need to resist the first word or sentence that comes to mind and work for something more precise. Research on school discipline has also found that structure, support and strong teacher-pupil relationships are associated with self-control, while studies of self-regulated learning in higher education suggest that interventions can improve both self-regulation and attainment. Westwell’s point is that teachers already do much of this work when they slow pupils down, prompt them to think again and create tasks that make disciplined thinking possible. The next step, he argues, is to make that purpose more deliberate: not only asking what pupils need to know, but also where they need help to stop, wait and choose better responses.