Helping Kids Develop Self-Regulation Strategies

I’ve been following Yalda T. Uhls' blog Parenting in the Digital Age. 

Ms Uhl is a researcher with the Children’s Digital Media Center@LA (CDMC@LA) at UCLA and Regional Director of Common Sense Media’s Los Angeles office and an expert on media effects on children.  I often visit her site and find it really interesting to gain insight into how the academic world approaches learning and technology for our kids.

I caught a post she contributed to Mind/Shift (another great blog on learning with technology), about kids needing to learn self-regulation.  To paraphrase Ms Uhls, she believes:

“Helping kids develop strategies like self-regulation will allow them to use their own initiative and to direct themselves — without adult supervision. A good self-regulator will pay attention to tasks, persist when it becomes difficult, demonstrate flexibility, and be confident that more effort will lead to positive outcomes. As educators move towards using digital media to teach, and we rely more on children’s independent initiative and motivation, it’s important to develop kids’ learning strategies so they stay on topic while they use these tools.”

I absolutely agree with her.  Learning to study independently and knowing that they can solve a problem if they stick with it is really important for our kids.  The earlier kids learn that persisting with a challenge, approaching it from different directions and finally coming up with the answer, will set them up for success in their academic careers.  This is one of the goals of K5 Learning – a technology tool for individual independent studying for early elementary learners.

Thanks Yalda Uhls for bringing this topic to the forefront.