Addressing educational inequalities and promoting learning through studies of stress physiology in elementary school students

Abstract

To be ready to learn, children need to be focused, engaged, and able to bounce back from setbacks. However, many children come to school with heightened or diminished physiological arousal due to exposure to poverty-related risks. While stress physiology plays a role in explaining how adversity relates to processes that support students’ cognitive development, there is a lack of studies of physiological stress response in educational settings. This review integrates relevant studies and offers future directions for research on the role of stress physiology in the school adaptation of elementary school students, focusing on these important questions: (a) What are the links between physiological stress response and learning-related skills and behaviors, and do they vary as a function of proximal and distal experiences outside of school? (b) How are school experiences associated with students’ physiological stress response and related cognitive and behavioral adaptations? (c) How can we leverage measures of students’ physiological stress response in evaluations of school-based interventions to better support the school success of every student? We hope to stimulate a new wave of research that will advance the science of developmental stress physiology, as well as improve the application of these findings in educational policy and practice.

Self‐regulated behavior and parent‐child co‐regulation are associated with young children's physiological response to receiving critical adult feedback

“…More in situ work is needed to examine the extent to which our findings are generalizable across different educational settings (Obradović & Armstrong‐Carter, 2020). However, the current findings have real‐life implications for children's developmental trajectories of adjustment.…”

“…Our study revealed that the period after critical feedback has ceased may be especially relevant for young students with lower self‐regulatory skills. Educators may consider offering these students support vis‐a‐vis self‐regulation strategies or appraisal strategies in order to minimize potential deleterious effects that prolonged stress arousal can have on health and learning (Obradović & Armstrong‐Carter, 2020). Research in classrooms could clarify whether behavioral self‐regulation and parent‐child co‐regulation explain variability in children's physiological adaptation to receiving critical feedback in real, daily, and educational settings.…”

“…Further, greater decreases in PNS activity during socially and emotionally challenging laboratory tasks have been linked to more positive developmental outcomes, such as parent and teacher reports of children's emotion regulation skills and on‐task behavior (Blair & Peters, 2003; Gentzler et al., 2009; Hastings et al., 2008; Kahle et al., 2018; Santucci et al., 2008). Given implications of both young children's physiological and behavioral regulation for broader developmental outcomes (Davis et al., 2020; Doebel, 2020; Obradović & Armstrong‐Carter, 2020), it is important to further investigate the extent to which physiological and behavioral regulation are related. Because physiological response is a dynamic and multi‐determined process (Davis et al., 2020), studies need to examine how children's self‐regulation behavior relates to both physiological reactivity and physiological recovery.…”

Daily provision of instrumental and emotional support to friends is associated with diurnal cortisol during adolescence

“…This study extends emerging interest in understanding how adolescents' daily prosocial behavior “gets under the skin” (Fuligni & Telzer, 2013), and is linked to the regulation of stress‐physiological systems. Studying stress‐physiology indexed via levels of the hormone cortisol provides unique insight to the ways in which adolescents respond to social experiences that are not readily observable or indicated by self‐report (Obradović & Armstrong‐Carter, 2020), but are meaningfully linked to adolescents' well‐being both concurrently and across the lifespan (Adam et al., 2017).…”

Taking a few deep breaths significantly reduces children's physiological arousal in everyday settings: Results of a preregistered video intervention

“…This effective video tool can be easily employed in home, school, or online settings to introduce children to deep breathing as a self‐regulation technique. We hope this work is just the beginning of a new wave of psychophysiological research that goes beyond understanding how experiences “get under the skin” (Lupien et al., 2001) and has clear, practical implication for supporting child development (Gunnar, 2020; Obradović & Armstrong‐Carter, 2020).…”