Utilizing play to increase usage of self-regulation strategies

Abstract

Self-regulation is a prevalent issue in classrooms today; students are increasingly unable to wait their turn, control inhibitions and delay gratifications. Play, among children recently, has been on a downward trend and is continuously changing what it looks like. This study aimed to link the two concepts to see if utilizing play in a middle school classroom of grade six students could increase the students’ ability to incorporate more self-regulation into their repertoire of skills after being taught a set of four by the teacher/researcher. The researcher used a self-made tally sheet to track usage of strategies over a period of three weeks with two observation phases and one teaching phase: baseline observations, teaching strategies and final observations. The research indicated that while the usage of strategies did slightly increase, it is not certain that play had an impact on this increase. Additionally the students were loyal to the strategies they knew previously and did not attempt two of the four strategies taught.