Razza to present “Attention, Self-Regulation and School Success”

Rachel A. Razza, Ph.D., assistant professor, Department of Child and Family Studies, will be a featured presenter at the upcoming conference, “Executive Skills for School Success: Enhancing Self-Regulation, Reasoning and Working Memory.” The conference, which takes place May 3-5 in Arlington, VA, will explore the science of “executive function” and how to use teaching strategies, meditation, exercise and brain training to enhance working memory, attention, self-control, thinking, and visual-spatial skills to better prepare students for the future.

Dr. Razza’s presentation is included in the conference segment focused on addressing attention and ADHD to raise achievement. Her presentation is entitled, “Attention, Self-Regulation and School Success.” She is the Co-principal investigator on a study entitled, “Enhancing At-Risk Children’s Self-Regulation Via Mindfulness and Yoga.” Additionally she has recently co-authored, “Sustained attention at age 5 predicts attention-related problems at age 9’ in the International Journal of Behavioral Development and “The implications of early attentional regulation for school success among low-income children” in Applied Developmental Psychology.

The primary focus of Dr. Razza’s scholarly work is children’s self-regulation, a multifaceted construct that encompasses a variety of skills underlying children’s ability to monitor cognitive strategies and adapt behavior to fit situational demands. Specifically, her work explores associations among different facets of self-regulation, contextual predictors of self-regulation, and implications of various self-regulatory skills for children’s school readiness and later school success. She is particularly interested in specifying these pathways among at-risk children, as these children are particularly at-risk for self-regulatory deficits. In addition, her recent work examines mindful yoga as a potential intervention strategy to enhance self-regulation among young children.

The conference is sponsored by Learning & the Brain, an organization that links neuroscientists and educators to explore new research on the brain and learning and its implications for education. These conferences and summer institutes bring neuroscience and educational research directly from the researchers themselves to audiences that include educators and school administrators, speech and language pathologists, parents, researchers, policy makers, medical professionals, social workers and counselors.