Elsevier

Early Childhood Research Quarterly

Volume 36, 3rd Quarter 2016, Pages 379-390
Early Childhood Research Quarterly

Unique contributions of attentional control and visuomotor integration on concurrent teacher-reported classroom functioning in early elementary students

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecresq.2016.01.018Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Attentional control was related to teacher ratings of children’s self-regulation.

  • Visuomotor integration was related to teacher ratings of children’s self-regulation.

  • Attentional control and visuomotor integration did not predict problem behaviors.

  • Visuomotor integration predicts self-regulation even when attention is considered.

Abstract

In a diverse sample of 278 kindergarten and first grade students from two U.S. states, this study explored the concurrent associations between directly assessed cognitive processes linked to children’s development and learning—attentional control and visuomotor integration—and two teacher-reported classroom functioning outcomes: self-regulation and problem behaviors. In addition, we examined the relative contribution of attentional control and visuomotor integration to teacher-reported classroom functioning outcomes. After controlling for the effects of child characteristics including age, gender, preschool attendance, ethnicity, free/reduced lunch status, and fine motor coordination abilities, results indicated that attentional control and visuomotor integration were each directly related to teachers’ ratings of classroom self-regulation, but not to classroom problem behaviors. Even after accounting for children’s attentional control abilities and teachers’ ratings of problem behaviors, visuomotor integration was a strong and unique concurrent predictor of children’s classroom self-regulation, as reported by their teachers. Implications of these findings for research and practice are discussed.

Introduction

How well children adjust to the heightened behavioral demands of classroom life during the transition to primary school is a growing concern in an age of increasing academic accountability (e.g., Bulotsky-Shearer, Dominguez, & Bell, 2012; Neuenschwander, Rothlisberger, Cimeli, & Roebers, 2012). Along with developmental changes, children also experience changes in their learning environments during the transition to formal schooling. This transition typically consists of moving from relatively unstructured environments to a more academic, teacher-directed, structured context, in which children are expected to sit and concentrate on seatwork for prolonged periods of time (Entwisle & Alexander, 1998; La Paro, Rimm-Kaufman, & Pianta, 2006; Rimm-Kaufman & Pianta, 2000). To make a successful transition to school, young children rely not only on academic skills, but also cognitive and behavioral skills such as following directions, regulating emotions and impulses, and focusing their attention on challenging, potentially frustrating tasks. Teachers report that many children struggle with the transition to formal schooling, and over half of their students struggle with social and academic demands when they enter school (Lin, Lawrence, & Gorrell, 2003; Rimm-Kaufman, Pianta, & Cox, 2000).

Although rarely taught explicitly in the classroom, cognitive processes including attentional control and visuomotor integration are emerging as critical foundations for children’s academic achievement (e.g., Cameron et al., 2012; Carlson, Rowe, & Curby, 2013; Grissmer, Grimm, Aiyer, Murrah, & Steele, 2010; Korkman, Kirk, & Kemp, 1998). Attention drives children’s performance on academic assessments and their functioning in learning contexts; that is, attention underlies whether children are able to engage in learning tasks and avoid competing behaviors. Thus, previous studies show that attentional processes are also robustly related to children’s classroom functioning along with achievement (e.g., Brock, Rimm-Kaufman, Nathanson, & Grimm, 2009; Cameron Ponitz, McClelland, Matthews, & Morrison, 2009; Hughes and Ensor, 2008, Hughes and Ensor, 2011; Neuenschwander et al., 2012).

Despite evidence for academic relevance of visuomotor skills (e.g., Liew, Chen, & Hughes, 2010) and the prevalence of activities requiring fine motor coordination in early childhood classrooms (Marr, Cermak, Cohn, & Henderson, 2003), little research has explored how visuomotor integration relates to teachers’ perceptions of children’s classroom functioning during the transition to formal schooling. The present study examined concurrent associations between kindergarten and first graders’ attentional control and visuomotor integration and how their teachers perceived their classroom self-regulation and problem behaviors, as well as the relative contribution of attentional control and visuomotor integration to these indicators of classroom functioning. We were particularly interested in whether visuomotor integration would explain variance in children’s classroom functioning, even after accounting for their attentional control.

Attention is a multi-dimensional construct that consists of several executive sub-functions, including selective focusing and sustaining of attention, shifting or dividing of attention, and regulation of arousal (Cooley and Morris, 1990, Mirsky, 1996, Petersen and Posner, 2012; Ruff & Rothbart, 1996). Along with other higher order thought processes including inhibitory control and working memory, attention is one aspect of executive functioning (EF). Attention is involved in directing how EF skills are executed to produce goal-oriented responses and complete complex tasks (Espy & Bull, 2005; Klenberg, Korkman, & Lahti-Nuuttila, 2001; Visu-Petra, Benga, & Miclea, 2007; Zelazo, Mueller, Frye, & Markovitch, 2003), including regulating behavior (Cameron Ponitz et al., 2009, McClelland et al., 2007).

For the purposes of this study, we use the term attentional control to refer to continual selective processing of visual stimuli. Such skills are typically assessed using visual search tasks such as paper-and-pencil cancellation tests, which have construct (Baron, 2004, Espy and Bull, 2005, Mahone and Schneider, 2012) as well as ecological validity, given how much of the primary school day is spent in paper-pencil tasks (Marr et al., 2003). The control of attention in these tasks requires children to cognitively engage (i.e., focus on the response sets that are currently active), as well as to disengage or inhibit response sets that were previously active. In other words, children must control their attention to resist a previously active response set from interfering with the current task at hand (Espy & Bull, 2005). Longitudinal studies indicate this type of attentional control (i.e., focused, selective, and sustained) develops and matures around the formal school transition period, as early as six years of age (Visu-Petra et al., 2007; Welsh, Pennington, & Groisser, 1991).

Similar to attentional control, visuomotor integration is a multi-dimensional construct comprised of several sub-components, such as synthesizing parts into a whole, constructing and manipulating representations, perceiving and understanding spatial orientation, and reproducing models using fine motor movements (Carlson et al., 2013; Korkman et al., 1998; Verdine, Irwin, Golinkoff, & Hirsh-Pasek, 2014). Visuomotor integration thus requires fine motor coordination, spatial, and executive attentional abilities (Beery & Beery, 2004). As such, integration combines interior processes with external actions, such as creating a mental representation of an external stimuli and replicating the stimulus with controlled small muscle movements as on a design copy task (Carlson et al., 2013, Korkman et al., 1998; Newcombe & Frick, 2010; Verdine et al., 2014). Fine motor coordination is considered a precursor to visuomotor integration (Kim, Duran, Cameron, & Grissmer, 2015), and correlations are significant and positive (r = .47, Carlson et al., 2013). Still, studies that are able to disentangle their contributions suggest the integration aspect of visuomotor skill is most relevant to academic performance (Carlson et al., 2013, Cameron et al., 2012, Grissmer et al., 2010). Central to our present study, which controls for fine motor coordination, success on visuomotor integration tasks also involves flexibility in shifting one’s attention back and forth between parts of the objects and the entire object as a whole (Mervis, Robinson, & Pani, 1999).

Theoretical and empirical evidence, including findings from neuroimaging studies, consistently indicate that attentional processes and visuomotor integration are highly related (e.g., Diamond, 2000, Floyer-Lea and Matthews, 2004; Miyake, Friedman, Rettinger, Shah, & Hegarty, 2001; Staines, Padilla, & Knight, 2002). Often, tasks that require visuomotor integration skills also require attentional control (Becker, Miao, Duncan, & McClelland, 2014; Beery and Beery, 2004, Korkman et al., 1998). Furthermore, both develop in the prefrontal cortex (PFC), supporting the idea that these two skills are interrelated (Diamond, 2000). Specifically, selective and sustained attentional control involves the superior parietal lobe, temporal parietal junction, and superior colliculus (Posner & Raichle, 1998); similarly, the superior parietal cortex and superior colliculus also play a critical role in visuomotor integration (Iacoboni & Zaidel, 2004; Lefèvre & Galiana, 1992). In sum, visuomotor integration requires functional networks that overlap substantially with the neural structures that underlie cognition and EF, including attentional control, as well as working memory, and inhibitory control (Floyer-Lea & Matthews, 2004; Staines, Padilla, & Knight, 2002). As such, studies that examine children’s attentional control should also consider their visuomotor integration skills.

In the classroom, children apply their attention constantly, such as when they must stay on task and work independently while avoiding distractions. Given its role in directing children’s cognitive efforts to learning, attention consistently contributes to longitudinal academic and behavioral outcomes (Blair and Razza, 2007, Duncan et al., 2007, Grissmer et al., 2010; McClelland, Acock, Piccinin, Rhea, & Stallings, 2013; Welsh, Nix, Blair, Bierman, & Nelson, 2010). Whereas attention, broadly defined, may underlie a child’s ability to pursue goals in the classroom, successful goal attainment also depends on the ability to navigate a busy environment; to parse new and complex visual information; and to manipulate classroom materials and tools. Therefore, it is not surprising that attention is an important contributing factor to children’s visuomotor integration (Decker, Englund, Carboni, & Brooks, 2011).

Within the paradigm of embodied cognition theory, attentional control and visuomotor integration co-develop, as children use their body and motor movements to interact with their environment (Campos et al., 2000). For instance, as children learn to control, coordinate, and integrate their bodies and motor movements to behave appropriately within the classroom context, their experiences support the acquisition and performance of the multiple processes involved, including attentional and motor control and their integration (Campos et al., 2000). Moreover, automaticity theory posits that cognitive resources become available as one is able to automatize, or perform a task without using one’s full attention, which in turn, makes it easier to simultaneously perform a second attention-demanding task (Floyer-Lea & Matthews, 2004). According to this theory, attentional control and visuomotor integration are co-dependent. In other words, these two processes compete for the limited amount of cognitive resources that are available (Cameron et al., 2012, Rapport et al., 2009). In elementary school, children are often asked to simultaneously perform multiple tasks, and coordinating attentional processes along with visuomotor integration skills is necessary to successfully carry out these tasks (Blair, 2002). For instance, children may need to attend to multiple teacher directions and then manipulate several kinds of materials. Classrooms also require children to persist despite difficulties and environmental distractions and to solicit help appropriately when a task is too difficult. Because children who have automatized the visuomotor aspects of a task do not need to pay attention to executing the visual and motor movements, they may have additional cognitive resources available for regulating their behavior. On the other hand, children who have not yet achieved this level of automaticity must direct their resources toward the visuomotor task components, thereby having fewer resources available for executing appropriate behaviors.

Although attentional control and visuomotor integration are theoretically and empirically related, the few studies including measures of both suggest they are distinct constructs (Korkman et al., 1998). For instance, in a sample of 127 four- and five-year olds, Becker et al. (2014) found that attention, inhibitory control, and working memory measures of EF and visuomotor skills were significantly and positively related to each other, as well as differentially related to measures of emergent literacy, mathematics, and vocabulary. Specifically, even controlling for attention and the other EF measures, children with better visuomotor integration had higher concurrent achievement. Based on these findings, attention and visuomotor integration may separately be important for classroom functioning.

Classroom functioning is defined in the present study as teachers’ perceptions of children’s classroom self-regulation and problem behaviors. On the one hand, children with strong self-regulation in the classroom, also referred to as learning-related social skills, develop stronger relationships with their teachers and have higher academic achievement (Cameron Ponitz et al., 2009; Ladd, Birch, & Buhs, 1999; McClelland, Morrison, & Holmes, 2000). On the other hand, children who struggle with problem behaviors have difficulty engaging in positive learning opportunities in both academic and social opportunities, which has negative long-term implications (Vitaro, Brendgen, Larose, & Tremblay, 2005). Though there are likely other important aspects of classroom functioning, we here focus on a set of behaviors that teachers would view as desirable (classroom self-regulation), as well as a set of behaviors that they see as undesirable (problem behaviors). As we describe next, prior work suggests links between these aspects of classroom functioning and our predictors of interest (attentional control and visuomotor integration).

Self-regulation has been conceptualized in many different ways, e.g., as effortful control (Valiente, Lemery-Chalfant, Swanson, & Reiser, 2008), self-control (Vohs & Baumeister, 2004), or delay of gratification (Mischel, Shoda, & Rodriguez, 1989). In general, self-regulation in early childhood means “the exercise of control with oneself, especially with regard to bringing the self into line with preferred standards” (Vohs & Baumeister, 2004; p. 2). Through effective integration and balance of emotion and cognition, self-regulatory capacity emerges around when children are entering formal schooling (Blair, 2002). Furthermore, young children’s self-regulatory abilities are strongly implicated in later developmental outcomes, including improved social competence (Denham et al., 2003) and cognitive achievement (Shoda, Mischel, & Peake, 1990), and lower levels of problematic social behaviors (e.g., Campbell, Pierce, March, Ewing, & Szumowski, 1994). Given the importance of self-regulation to later development, it is essential to understand what skills and processes contribute to children’s self-regulatory abilities.

Attention, specifically attentional control is an important contributor to the emergence of children’s self-regulation abilities (e.g., Blair and Razza, 2007, Posner and Rothbart, 2009, Rueda et al., 2004). Ruff and Rothbart (1996) proposed that attention was a “part of the larger construction of self-regulation—the ability to modulate behavior according to the cognitive, emotional, and social demands of specific situations” (p. 7). In other words, attentional abilities play a role in facilitating adaptive self-regulation (Hofmann, Schmeichel, & Baddeley, 2012; Ruff & Rothbart, 1996; Ursache, Blair, & Raver, 2012). Strong attentional control helps children practice and become more adept at attending to classroom rules and tasks and in modulating their emotions and distress to maintain appropriate behaviors in the classroom. In support of this view, Neuenschwander et al. (2012) showed that kindergarten and first grade students’ EF, measured using a latent factor consisting of three components of updating (Backward Color Recall task; Schmid, Zoelch, & Roebers, 2008), inhibition (adapted version of the Fruit Stroop task; Archibald & Kerns, 1999), and shifting (Cognitive Flexibility task; Zimmermann, Gondan, & Fimm, 2004), which overlap to a degree with aspects of attentional control (Welsh, 2001), was a strong predictor of their learning-related behaviors such as listening to and following directions, and accomplishing tasks in a timely manner (McClelland, Acock, & Morrison, 2006; McClelland et al., 2000). Similarly, kindergartners with higher scores on a battery of EF measures, including voluntary attentional control and persistence (Eisenberg et al., 2004), were later reported by their teachers as being more engaged, with better self-control and more positive work habits in the classroom, compared to kindergarteners with poor attention (Brock et al., 2009).

While the link between attentional control and classroom self-regulation is well-established, other cognitive processes may be important for children to regulate their behavior in school settings given the complexities of the early childhood classroom (Cameron, Cottone, Murrah, & Grissmer, in press). Consistent with this line of reasoning, preschool children’s early visuomotor integration skills were positively related to nonverbal aspects of social behavior and affect regulation (Cole, Usher, & Cargo, 1993). More recently, using a different sample in the same population as the current study, Kim, Murrah et al. (2015) found that early elementary teachers who perceived children as having strong classroom fine and visuomotor skills perceived them as having better self-regulation skills in the classroom. In another study of preschoolers across five U.S. states, visuomotor integration served as a protective factor, such that teachers rated children with strong visuomotor integration skills as having effective learning behaviors in the classroom, despite having weak inhibitory control (Cameron et al., 2015). Taken together, these studies suggest that visuomotor integration, beyond attentional control, may help young children cope with the early elementary learning environment, and needs to be further investigated.

Children who exhibit problem behaviors in the classroom may demonstrate externalizing behavior patterns, such as overactive, impulsive, or aggressive interpersonal behaviors that are directed towards others or the environment (Achenbach & Edelbrock, 1978; Baker, Grant, & Morlock, 2008; Eisenberg et al., 2001, Hinshaw, 1987); or internalizing behavior patterns, such as social withdrawal, anxiety, or depression (Gresham, Elliott, & Kettler, 2010). Problem behaviors are behaviors that compete with or interfere with whether children acquire and/or perform appropriate social behaviors, including regulating their emotions and actions (Gresham et al., 2010). For instance, a child who is noncompliant to teacher requests to wait to eat snack may have a difficult time attaining appropriate prosocial behaviors, such as self-control (Eddy, Reid, & Curry, 2002; Gresham et al., 2010).

Development in attentional processes and self-regulation coincides with declines in problem behaviors in children around the time of school entry (Jacques, Zelazo, Kirkham, & Semcesen, 1999). Children with strong executive skills, such as the ability to shift attention from one task to another, initiate tasks, and utilize working memory (Pennington & Ozonoff, 1996), can inhibit initial aggressive responses to difficult social situations, and thus, avoid conflicts with peers and teachers (Riggs, Blair, & Greenberg, 2003). On the other hand, poor executive skills, including difficulties with the executive demands of maintaining information, resisting distraction, resolving conflict, and flexibly shifting, are consistently linked to higher levels of problem behaviors (e.g., Espy, Sheffield, Wiebe, Clark, & Moehr, 2011). For instance, lower executive skills, as measured by four EF tasks that were designed to tap working memory (Spin the Pots and Beads; Thorndike, Hagen, & Sattler, 1986) and the capacity to control attention for rule learning and rule shifting (Stroop and Trucks), at three years of age were associated with increases in problem behaviors at four years of age, even after controlling for children’s problem behaviors at age three (Hughes & Ensor, 2008). Problem behaviors was measured as an aggregate of three questionnaires, one of which was the total externalizing problems scale from the Social Skills Rating Scale (SSRS, Gresham & Elliott, 1990) that were completed by the mothers at both ages three and four and teachers/playgroup leaders at age four.

Theoretically, visuomotor integration deficits mean children may have difficulty perceiving spatial information, or integrating and coordinating this information with their motor movements. Such difficulties may contribute to heightened levels of frustration and acting out in the classroom. Relatively few studies have examined children’s visuomotor integration skills in relation to problem behaviors, and far fewer studies examine these associations in early elementary, typically-developing students. Bart, Hajami and Yair Bar-Haim (2007) found that 12% of the variance in first graders’ disruptive behavior could be accounted for by their scores on a visuomotor integration task (Beery, 1989), which entailed copying increasingly complex designs with a paper and pencil. Moreover, Cole et al. (1993) recruited preschoolers whose parents reported specific behavior problems; then each child was assigned to a high, medium, or low risk group for behavior problems in school based on parent and teacher report measures. They found that children in the more at-risk groups (medium or high vs. low) had lower visuomotor integration skills, but not EF. This suggests that visuomotor integration may be particularly important, even when other cognitive skills are considered. Although this work is suggestive, it does not clarify the link between visuomotor integration and problem behaviors in early elementary school, indicating a need for further work.

The primary aim of this study was to explore direct, concurrent associations between visuomotor integration and teacher ratings of classroom self-regulation and problem behaviors. Based on previous research (e.g., Bart et al., 2007, Cole et al., 1993, Hughes and Ensor, 2008), we hypothesized that both attentional control and visuomotor integration would be associated with teacher ratings of classroom self-regulation and classroom problem behaviors, after considering other important child factors including fine motor coordination and demographic variables associated with cognitive development (e.g., age, gender, and socio-economic status or SES). Our hypothesis was based on research indicating that attentional control and visuomotor integration overlap but are clearly distinct (e.g., Campos et al., 2000, Korkman et al., 1998). Specifically we anticipated that visuomotor integration would emerge as a unique predictor of classroom self-regulation and problem behaviors, over and above children’s attentional control abilities. In addition, given that self-regulation and problem behaviors in the classroom are strongly related (e.g., Gresham et al., 2010), we examined outcomes in a multivariate regression framework. That is, when examining teacher ratings of children’s self-regulation as the outcome, problem behaviors was included as a covariate, whereas when teacher ratings of children’s problem behaviors was the outcome, we controlled for classroom self-regulation.

Section snippets

Participants

Data for the current study, which is correlational in design, come from the baseline data point of a larger longitudinal intervention study that targeted children’s cognitive and academic skills through activities delivered during an after-school program. The larger study involved three low-income urban schools in a southern state and five mixed-income elementary schools in a mid-Atlantic state. First, our research team approached and consented schools that had after-school programs; then

Results

Descriptive statistics for all variables included in the analyses are shown in Table 1. On average, children scored within their age equivalent raw scores for attentional control (M = 9.32, SD = 4.69), visuomotor integration (M = 37.26, SD = 9.18), and fine motor coordination (M = 13.39, SD = 7.18), as determined by a nationally representative standardization sample (see Korkman et al., 1998). Unadjusted bivariate correlation coefficients for all study variables are shown in Table 2 for the overall sample,

Discussion

With a diverse sample of kindergarten and first grade students from two U.S. states, this study explored the concurrent associations of two fundamental cognitive processes that have been linked with children’s learning and development—attentional control and visuomotor integration—with teachers’ perceptions of students’ classroom self-regulation and problem behaviors. Results supported our general hypothesis, showing unique contributions of visuomotor integration to outcomes. Specifically, we

Conclusion

Whether children are ready for school depends on multiple processes and skills that work together in the classroom context. Beyond attentional control, the present study establishes another skill set, visuomotor integration, which contributes to teachers’ ratings of children’s classroom behavior, specifically self-regulation including whether children can complete multi-step classroom tasks and organize their materials for learning. Future efforts to understand this result will enrich the

Acknowledgements

This study was funded by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) under award number 1RC1HD063534-01, the National Science Foundation under award numbers DRL-0815787 and REAL-1252463, and by the Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education, through Grant #R305B090002 to the University of Virginia. The opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not represent views of the Institute or the U.S. Department of Education.

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