Self-regulation is an essential ability of children to cope with various developmental challenges. This study examines the developmental interplay between emotional and behavioral self-regulation during childhood and the relationship with academic achievement using data from the longitudinal Millennium Cohort Study (UK). Using cross-lagged panel analyses, we found that emotional and behavioral self-regulation were separate and stable constructs. In addition, both emotional and behavioral self-regulation had positive cross-lagged effects from ages 3 to 7. At an early developmental stage (ages 3 to 5), emotional regulation affected behavioral regulation more strongly than later developmental stages. However, the difference between the reciprocal effects was small from ages 5 to 7. Moreover, behavioral regulation during the third year of primary education (age 7) had a substantial and positive effect on teachers’ evaluations of educational achievement during the last year of primary school (age 11). In contrast, emotional self-regulation only had a small indirect and positive effect via behavioral self-regulation. The current study suggests the structure of self-regulation was multidimensional and its facets are mutually dependent in the child’s development. In order to gain a complete picture of the development of self-regulation and its effect on educational achievement, the facets emotional and behavioral regulation should both be studied in concert.

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Self-regulation plays a fundamental role in academic achievement in that it helps students to modify their emotions, behavior, and cognition to meet the demands of learning activities. The central objective of this dissertation was to examine the developmental relationship between self-regulation and academic achievement during childhood. The dissertation combines the results of three related papers to answer this broad objective. Before investigating the developmental interplay between the different aspects of self-regulation and academic achievement, first, the question of whether self-regulation is a unitary or a multidimensional construct was addressed. The result of the first paper supports a multidimensional self-regulation where emotional and behavioral regulation are related but developmentally separate constructs. In addition to their developmental distinctiveness, emotional and behavioral regulation showed a reciprocal relationship from ages three to five and five to seven. The three main components of self-regulation—emotional regulation, behavioral regulation, and metacognition—are assumed to have unique mechanisms to positively influence academic achievement. The result of the cross-lagged panel analysis in the first paper demonstrates that behavioral regulation at the age of seven is a strong predictor of academic achievement at the age of 11, even after taking socioeconomic status into account. The other two papers focused on the developmental relationship between metacognition and academic achievement. The result of the multivariate latent growth curve analysis, in the second paper, reveals that intra-developmental changes in declarative metacognition and reading comprehension are positively and significantly related from grades 5 to 8, even after taking verbal cognitive ability into account. The third paper examined the developmental interplay between metacognitive monitoring and reading comprehension from grades 5 to 9, and a reciprocal relationship is observed.