SELFICON - self-regulation in context

Children are facing an increasingly unpredictable future. Globalization, technological advances, and artificial intelligence are causing society to change at an ever-increasing pace. To navigate such a complex world, self-regulation is an essential skill. 

Good self-regulation depends on the ability to resist impulses, update working memory, and handle anything that requires our attention. These executive functions help us regulate our thoughts, emotions, and behaviors to manage complex information, resist distractions, cope with new situations, learn, and achieve goals.

How can we best support children in developing this skill? The Self-Regulation in Context (SELFICON) project will use a new approach to promote children's self-regulation. Children's use of executive functions and self-regulatory behaviors depends on the context in which they find themselves. 

The aim of the project is to increase our understanding of how we can adjust the learning context to facilitate better self-regulation in learning situations. Aspects that influence this can be individual, environmental, and task-specific.

The aims of the project are: 

To investigate students' and teachers' existing knowledge of self-regulation and how the context influences self-regulation in learning situations. We will do this using descriptive methods. This will result in an overview of their knowledge about self-regulation.

To investigate the effect of context on executive functions at the physiological level, thus gaining empirical knowledge about how context can help students utilize executive functions. Here we will use neuroscientific methods.

To create guidelines, tools, and strategies and evaluate the effects in the classroom, which will result in new practical and theoretical knowledge as well as educational materials. We will achieve this using design research methods and collaborating with students and teachers.

We will work closely with students and teachers and combine methods from educational science, psychology, and neuroscience.