Research has consistently demonstrated that self-regulation is essential for the development and preservation of health and well-being in the early years and across the lifespan. Based on the emerging literature on the important role of self-regulation in promoting healthy child development, policymakers have made efforts to include self-regulation skills in practice and policy documents worldwide. Despite efforts to include self-regulation skills in early years curriculum documents, there is limited understanding by teachers, scholars, and policymakers of what self-regulation is and how best to support it in the day-to-day classroom. This limited understanding is perpetuated by a lack of a unified definition of self-regulation. Thus, it becomes important to examine these efforts in a critical way. In Ontario, where the research was completed, a revised play-based full-day kindergarten program was introduced in 2016. In this research we use a qualitative document analysis approach to compare the conceptualization of self-regulation in Ontario’s revised play-based kindergarten program with theory-driven models of self-regulation from empirical research. Analysis was iterative, and themes emerged based upon a coding scheme developed by the research team. Results suggest that co-regulation has a powerful influence on student learning. In addition, the policy document de-emphasizes behavioral regulation and expands cognitive regulation to include more than inhibitory control. Lastly, the kindergarten program discusses metacognition in relation to the use of language to articulate one’s thinking with little attention to goal-directed behaviors. In this paper, explicit recommendations for policymakers and practitioners are provided to ensure that emerging conceptualizations of self-regulation are promoted in early years curricula. Further, empirical evidence is needed to support why it is necessary to understand emerging conceptualizations of self-regulation and outline implications for current early years curricula.

研究一致表明，自我调节对于早期和整个生命周期的健康和福祉的发展和保持至关重要。基于关于自我调节在促进儿童健康发展中的重要作用的新兴文献，政策制定者已努力将自我调节技能纳入全球实践和政策文件中。尽管努力在早年课程文件中包含自我调节技能，但教师、学者和政策制定者对自我调节是什么以及如何在日常课堂中最好地支持它的理解有限。由于缺乏对自我调节的统一定义，这种有限的理解得以延续。因此，以批判的方式检查这些努力变得很重要。在完成研究的安大略省，2016 年引入了一个修订的基于游戏的全日制幼儿园计划。在这项研究中，我们使用定性文件分析方法将安大略省修订的基于游戏的幼儿园计划中的自我调节概念化与理论驱动的自我调节模型进行比较从实证研究来看。分析是迭代的，主题是基于研究团队开发的编码方案出现的。结果表明，共同调节对学生的学习有强大的影响。此外，该政策文件不再强调行为监管，并将认知监管扩展到不仅仅包括抑制性控制。最后，幼儿园课程讨论了与使用语言表达自己的思想有关的元认知，而很少关注目标导向的行为。在本文中，为决策者和从业者提供了明确的建议，以确保在早年课程中促进新出现的自我调节概念。此外，需要经验证据来支持为什么有必要了解自我调节的新兴概念并概述对当前早期课程的影响。