Abstract
Children’s ability to engage positively with tasks or learning activities in the preschool classroom is a key indicator of their school readiness. Regulation-related skills, such as emotion regulation, provide a foundation for children to get the most of a learning environment and are associated with positive academic engagement. Notably, children growing up in poverty are at an increased risk for lower self-regulation and have more to gain from high-quality early childhood education programs, in which teachers’ use of high-quality instructional practices may act as a protective factor. In a secondary analysis of two cohorts of preschoolers (N = 480) from 71 Head Start classrooms, the current study used a multilevel analytic approach to examine child-level emotion regulation and lability as contributors to children’s observed task engagement, as well as the direct and moderating role of classroom-level instructional support quality. Findings highlight both emotional lability (i.e., dysregulation) and instructional support quality as significant predictors of children’s gains in task engagement from fall to spring of the preschool year. Sensitivity analyses are included. Implications for future research, practice, and policy in the early childhood education context are discussed.