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The Journal of Educational Research

ISSN: 0022-0671 (Print) 1940-0675 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/vjer20

The association among literacy proficiency, effortful control, and frustration

Su-Ying Huang & Li-Li Yeh

To cite this article: Su-Ying Huang & Li-Li Yeh (2019) The association among literacy proficiency, effortful control, and frustration, The Journal of Educational Research, 112:2, 168-178, DOI: 10.1080/00220671.2018.1461599

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00220671.2018.1461599

Published online: 17 May 2018.

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The association among literacy proficiency, effortful control, and frustration

Su-Ying Huanga and Li-Li Yehb

aDepartment of Clinical Psychology, Fu Jen Catholic University, New Taipei City, Taiwan; bDepartment of Audiology and Speech-Language Pathology, Mackay Medical College, New Taipei City, Taiwan

ARTICLE HISTORY Received 12 December 2017 Revised 28 March 2018 Accepted 31 March 2018

ABSTRACT The authors investigated the relationships among effortful control and frustration and literacy proficiency of preadolescence to determine which subcomponent of effortful control and/or emotion might be critical in achieving academic success. The participants included 72 children recruited from a larger longitudinal study. Children’s frustration, effortful control, and literacy skills were assessed at Grade 5, and their nonverbal IQ levels were assessed at Grade 1. Effortful control and frustration were measured by a self- report questionnaire. Literacy proficiency was measured with tests of reading comprehension, written language, and the semestral grades in the subject of Chinese literacy. Results showed that children with higher effortful control perception had better literacy abilities, particularly writing and language academic achievement. The dispositional frustration moderated the predictive effect of attention control on children’s reading comprehension. The findings support the importance of self-regulation and emotions on literacy proficiency.

KEYWORDS Effortful control; frustration; literacy proficiency; self- regulation; temperament

Preadolescence is a transitional stage between childhood and adolescence, during which self-regulation skills—often associ- ated with children’s ability to adjust—continue to develop (King, Lengua, & Monahan, 2013). Preadolescents may seek recognition from their families and among their peers by achieving academic success, which is based on good literacy skills. Literacy is a new mode of communication that children need to learn as they begin formal schooling. Reading and writ- ing are the receptive and expressive aspects of literacy, respec- tively, and serve as the foundation of one’s learning of other subjects. A previous study has shown that children with better effortful control are more likely to perform better academically, such as in the area of literacy acquisition (Blair & Razza, 2007). In addition, emotions are functionally important in ensuring good academic performance (Pekrun, 2009). However, the key effects of effortful control and negative moods on the literacy performance of preadolescents have yet to be systematically investigated.

Effortful control is a dispositional, higher-order self-regula- tion of one’s temperament. It refers to one’s ability to perform effectively in a conflict situation, which requires one to demon- strate attention control, inhibit a dominant response, or acti- vate a goal-directed response (Posner & Rothbart, 1998; Rothbart, Derryberry, & Posner, 1994). Effortful control sup- ports individual attainment of competence-related goals (Rothbart & Hwang, 2005) and is related to school adaptation (Blair, 2002). For adolescents, effortful control is constantly developing and becoming more crucial, particularly for those who display more intense negative emotions when it comes to facing challenging situations (Oldehinkel, Hartman, Ferdinand, Verhulst, & Ormel, 2007).

Effortful control emerges from the end stage of infancy, markedly increases during preschool, and continues its devel- opment into adolescence (Rueda, Posner, & Rothbart, 2011). It is a broad construct consisting of specific components, namely, attention control, inhibitory control, and activation control after middle childhood (i.e., around 8 years old; Putnam, Ellis, & Rothbart, 2001). Effortful control not only is influenced by biological factors, but also can be shaped by environmental fac- tors, such as family context and parental practices (Rothbart & Bates, 2006). Given that literacy acquisition requires complex processing (e.g., encoding and decoding signals, comprehend- ing and composing passages) and also emerges from the pre- school period, there is a growing interest in the regulation processes involved in children’s literacy acquisition (e.g., Blair & Razza, 2007; McClelland et al., 2007).

Emotions are crucial contributors to students’ motivation, interpersonal resources, memory, and learning (Valiente, Swanson, & Eisenberg, 2012). Specific emotions relate to child- ren’s development for different reasons, thus requiring an assessment of specific types of emotions, instead of using broad composites, such as emotionality (Rothbart & Bate, 2006; Valiente et al., 2012). Anger or frustration, as negative emo- tions, involves a tendency to experience an unpleasant affect, which can be led by goal blocking. The kind of emotion may increase when children enter school because this is where they face more academic expectations from themselves or others (Eisenberg et al., 2005).

Thus far, the direct association between negative emotions and academic achievement has not been fully examined (Valiente et al., 2012), particularly for the critical period of liter- acy and effortful control acquisition (i.e., at the preadolescence

CONTACT Dr. Li-Li Yeh [email protected] Department of Audiology and Speech-Language Pathology, Mackay Medical College, No.46, Sec. 3, Zhongzheng Rd., Sanzhi Dist., New Taipei City, Taiwan. © 2018 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC

https://doi.org/10.1080/00220671.2018.1461599

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stage). In addition, given that the direct associations between specific measures of negative emotion and achievement are at a modest level (Valient et al., 2012), the potential indirect effects of emotion must also be investigated (Blair, 2002).

Role of effortful control on literacy acquisition

Effortful control is significantly associated with preschoolers’ prerequisite literacy skills, such as phonemic awareness and let- ter knowledge, and must be strengthened for children from low socioeconomic status families to avoid possible school failures (Blair & Razza, 2007). For 7- to 12-year-old children, the global effortful control score as reported by parents, is positively related to children’s grade point average in language, vocabu- lary, and mathematics (Valiente, Lemery-Chalfant, Swanson, & Reiser, 2008). Furthermore, global effortful control at Grade 1 significantly predicted academic performance in mathematics and Chinese four years later among Chinese children (Zhou, Main, & Wang, 2010). McClelland et al. (2007) indicated that the specific components of effortful control (e.g., attention con- trol, inhibitory control) are positively related to letter-word identification and the vocabulary ability of preschool children.

Attention control, including attention focusing and shifting, is a more cognitively oriented component of effortful control. Past studies have reported the direct link between academic competence and attention control, which serves as a key factor in promoting academic achievement and learning (Liew, 2012; Valiente et al., 2008). Children who have difficulty directing their attention are more likely to experience significant chal- lenges when trying to learn educational materials (Valiente et al., 2008). Empirical data have shown that children who have difficulty focusing their attention often have poor reading and language skills (McGee, Partridge, Williams, & Silva, 1991; Tamis-LeMonda & Bornstein, 1989). Attention control can also regulate emotions and limit the impact of (anxiety) emo- tion on information processing (Derrybery & Reed, 2002).

Inhibitory control and activation control are two behavioral regulation components of effortful control. First, inhibitory control is the ability to appropriately inhibit a dominant response or desirable behavior (Putnam & Rothbart, 2006). Associated with emotional adaptation, inhibitory control rap- idly develops with marked improvement during childhood (Lengua, 2003; Williams, Ponesse, Schachar, Logan, & Tannock, 1999). However, its contribution on academic success are inconsistent. For example, Blair and Razza (2007) indicated that the inhibitory control by direct measurement is positively associated with the letter knowledge of preschoolers. Neverthe- less, the inhibitory control of parents’ rating does not have a significant association with children’s literacy abilities. The inconsistency among past studies may be attributed to different test environments or the design of tasks conducted among vari- ous studies.

Meanwhile, activation control is the ability to plan new actions; it also refers to the ability to perform the appropriate action when there is a tendency to give up, when people are experiencing challenges or failures, or when individuals are facing detestable learning tasks (Posner & Rothbart, 1998; Rothbart et al., 1994). In stressful situations, such as when people are facing challenges or failures, they may also need to

force themselves to take action to ameliorate the situation. Activation control is the key that enables an individual to per- form unpleasant activities, which can be helpful in achieving one’s long-term goals (Ellis, 2002). Literacy acquisition requires complicated processing. For example, when writing an assignment, children need to actively engage and initiate behaviors to work on tasks that they may otherwise want to avoid. However, to our knowledge, no study has yet to directly examine the role of activation control on the literacy abilities of school-age children.

In summary, although evidence has proven that effortful control has a direct link with children’s literacy in early child- hood, few studies have focused on school-age children, particu- larly preadolescents. Aside from analyzing effortful control in general, studying both the direct and indirect predictive effects by examining various components of effortful control can also improve our understanding of whether any specific component of effortful control is uniquely predictive of academic achieve- ment (Valiente et al., 2008), and whether specific components are associated with literacy performance.

Association between frustration and literacy acquisition

Different negative moods may have varying associations with academic performance (Schwarz, 2001), and an increasing number of studies have focused on the association between anxiety-related emotions and academic performance (e.g., Duchesne, Vitaro, Larose, & Tremblay, 2008; Zeidner, 2007), particularly in how different negative moods may have varying predictive effects on academic performance (Schwarz, Chang, & Farver, 2001). Clarifying the relationship between emotions and achievement by specific types of emotions—instead of using broad composites, such as negative emotionality—is helpful in understanding the role of emotions in developing academic competence (Valiente et al., 2012).

Anger or frustration, as negative moods, may reduce achievement, because they disrupt cognitive resources, motiva- tion, and the use of flexible strategies (Blair, 2002; Rice, Levine, & Pizarro, 2007). According to previous studies, children’s frus- tration at school is correlated negatively with their academic self-efficacy, self-regulation of learning, and academic perfor- mance (Boekaerts, 1993; Pekrun, Goetz, Per, Kramer, & Hochstadt, 2004). Zhou et al. (2010) found that, based on teachers’ reports, Chinese children who had higher levels of dis- positional anger or frustration from 6 to 9 years old also had lower levels of academic performance (i.e., grade point aver- age). Furthermore, Blair (2002) proposed that emotions have an important contribution on the self-regulation of children, as they have not fully developed their cognitive and higher-order regulative abilities. Rothbart and Hwang (2005) also claimed that the efficiency of effortful control depends on the strength of the dominant response, such as emotional reactivity.

Effortful control demand and frustration reaction during reading and writing

Reading is an activity that is significantly correlated with both decoding skills and language comprehension. The correlations between word recognition and reading tend to decline with

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grade level, and the correlations between comprehension and reading tend to increase with grade level (Gough, Hoover, & Peterson, 1996). If frustration is more likely to arise when ongoing tasks are interrupted or when goal blocking occurs (e.g., Zhou et al., 2010), factors associated with reading fluency, such as word recognition skills or higher-level language com- prehension skills, may relate to experience of frustration. In other words, before school-aged children develop mature read- ing skills, particularly for early adolescents, frustration may eas- ily occur, especially when their goal for reading is mismatched to their academic assignments and texts (Graesser & D’Mello, 2012).

Writing consists of several processes, such as text construc- tion, handwriting, spelling, executive function, and working memory for accessing or selecting appropriate vocabulary (Owens, 2011). Therefore, compared with reading, writing as actively generating text may demand more self-regulatory skills to select and sustain attention, organize ideas, and control social and affective behavior (Ylvisaker & DeBonis, 2000). Unless it is under time pressure, writing itself emphasizes less on nonstop or fluent processing than reading. For early adoles- cents, compared with early writing skills, such as spelling or orthography knowledge, text generation is more critical to their writing performance (Owens, 2011).

Aims and research questions for this study

The aim of this study was to investigate whether children’s own perceptions of their effortful control and frustration had a rela- tive contribution to their literacy proficiency after their gender, age, and nonverbal IQ were controlled. The research questions are as follows:

Research Question 1: Does global effortful control predict the concurrent literacy proficiency? Is there any signifi- cant prediction effect between global effortful control and various indicators of literacy proficiency, such as reading comprehension, written expression, and semes- tral literacy test grade, while controlling for gender, nonverbal IQ, and age?

Research Question 2: How do the specific components of effortful control relate to different indicators of literacy proficiency?

Research Question 3: Does children’s dispositional frustra- tion have not only a direct predictive effect on children’s literacy proficiency, but also an indirect predictive effect on the influence of effortful control toward literacy proficiency?

Methods

Participants

Seventy-two Mandarin-speaking children (33 boys and 39 girls) in Taiwan, who were earlier recruited for a larger longitudinal study, were involved in the current longitudinal first- and sec- ond wave studies. At Wave 1, the children were in Grade 1; Wave 2 occurred four years later when the children were in Grade 5, with an average age of 10.77 years (SD D 0.27 years, age range D 10.17–11.17 years).

Measures

Nonverbal IQ The children’s nonverbal IQ scores at Grade 1 were assessed using Tonic Test of Nonverbal Intelligence (TONI-3; Brown, Sherhenou, & Johnsen, 1996).

Effortful control The short form of the Chinese version of the self-report ver- sions of the Early Adolescence Temperament Questionnaire- Revised (EATQ-R; Putnam et al., 2001) were employed to assess 9- to 15-year-old children’s effortful control (Ellis & Rothbart, 2001). The three subtasks of effort control include attention control (6 items, e.g., “It is easy for me to really con- centrate on homework problems”), inhibitory control (5 items; e.g., “When someone tells me to stop doing something, it is easy for me to stop”), and activation control (5 items; e.g., “If I have a hard assignment to do, I get started right away”). Items were rated on a 5-point Likert-type scale ranging from 1 (almost never true or almost always untrue) to 5 (almost always true). The EATQ-R is a valid and consistent scale employed to assess children and adolescents’ temperament, including effort- ful control. The Cronbach’s alpha values ranged from .67–.76 (Muris & Meesters, 2009).

Frustration The anger-frustration subscale of the negative emotionality in EATQ-R was used to measure the negative effects related to the interruption of ongoing tasks or goal blocking in children. The Cronbach’s alpha value of the 7-item test used in the current study was .72.

Reading comprehension Reading comprehension was measured using a paper-and-pen- cil task from a published Test of Reading Comprehension (Lin & Chi, 2000), which was designed for pupils in Grades 2–6. It is a standardized test that was published by the Minister of Education in Taiwan. In addition, it is a popular test employed by elementary teachers in Taiwan to assess pupils’ reading comprehension competence. This was a group test that took around 45 min to complete. The reading comprehension test contained six narrative passages and six expositive passages fol- lowed by multiple questions. The test assessed the children’s skills of phonological recoding, syntactic parsing, semantics, comprehending facts explicitly as stated in the text, deriving main ideas from the text, making inferences, and comparing or analyzing the facts stated in the text. The total raw score of the test is 100. The test manual reports internal consistencies rang- ing from .88 to .98 and test–retest reliability of .89.

Written expression Written language skills were assessed by a paper-and-pencil task from a published Test of Written Language (Lin & Chi, 2002) designed for pupils in Grades 3–6. This was a group test that took around 1 hr to complete. It is a standardized test that was published by the Minister of Education in Taiwan. It is one of the popular tests used by elementary teachers in Taiwan to assess pupils’ written expression competence. The written lan- guage test consisted of five subtasks, including listening-

S.-Y. HUANG AND L.-L. YEH170

writing, sentence combination, correction of characters, and clause and sentence construction. The total raw score of the test is 100. The test manual reports internal consistencies rang- ing from .76 to .97 and test–retest reliabilities of .79–.94.

Language academic achievement in terms of semestral grades Individual children’s grades were used to obtain measures of children’s academic competence in the domain of Chinese liter- acy. At the conclusion of the semester in January boundary 2014, we obtained the mid- and final-term grades, and the aver- age of the two examinations served as a composite of each stu- dent’s academic achievement. The semestral grades of Chinese literacy test consisted of word recognition, semantic discrimi- nation of a variety of words, reading comprehension of text- book or passages, the structure and format of articles, and sentence construction.

Procedure

All participants were recruited from Mandarin-speaking ele- mentary schools in North Taiwan during the 2009 and 2013 fall semester. At Grade 1, the nonverbal IQ of each child was individually assessed using the TONI-3 in school settings. At Grade 5, the children were assessed for Chinese comprehension and written ability. Self-report versions of the EATQ-R for children’s frustration and effortful control were also used. Only the test of nonverbal intelligence and reading comprehension was administered to groups. The average scores of academic achievement of language at Grade 5 were also collected.

Analysis

Before the hypothesis testing of the research topic, gender dif- ference analysis for all the variables was computed by separate multivariate analyses of variance. Next, the zero-order correla- tions among study variables were examined. Finally, hierarchi- cal regressions were conducted to test whether children’s frustration, overall effortful control, and the three components

of effortful control predicted their reading comprehension, written expression, and semestral Chinese literacy test grades after controlling for children’s gender, age, and nonverbal IQ.

Preliminary analysis Data were combined before analysis because no significant gen- der difference was found in all variables. Table 1 presents the means, standard deviations, and the Pearson correlation coeffi- cients for all study variables. The IQ score of all the children ranged from 82 to 134, with an average of 102.29 (SD D 10.77), and all the participants’ scores were above ¡1.5 SD, that is, within the normal range. The cohort’s performance of reading comprehension test ranged from 30 to 95, with an average of 76.42 (SD D 11.66). Only one participant had a score lower than the 15th percentile of the norm. However, the score was still above ¡1.5 SD according to the norms for 9-year-olds. Given that EATQ-R is suitable for 9- to 15-year-old preadoles- cents, it was thought that the participants’ reading comprehen- sion would allow them to finish the questionnaire and its results had validity.

Correlation analyses The analysis of zero-order correlations showed that children’s age positively correlated with reading comprehension and writ- ten expression, rs(70) D .27 and .31, ps D .022 and .009, respec- tively. In addition, nonverbal IQ positively correlated with written expression and semestral literacy test grades, rs(70) D .23 and .37, ps D .056 and .001, respectively. There was no sig- nificant correlation between frustration and children’s reading comprehension, written expression, and semestral literacy test grades.

Effortful control was positively associated with attention as well as inhibitory and activation control, rs(70) D .75, .62, and .76, respectively, ps < .001. Reading comprehension and writ- ten expression were positively related with semestral literacy test grades, rs(70) D .49 and .60, respectively, ps < .001. Effort- ful control was positively correlated with children’s written expression and semestral literacy test grades, rs(70) D .27 and .26, ps D .024 and .03, respectively. Attention control of

Table 1. Descriptive statistics and correlations for all variables in this study (N D 72). Variable 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

1. Gender — 2. Age .04 — 3. Nonverbal IQ .21 ¡.15 — 4. Frustration .02 .10 .06 — 5. Effortful control .00 ¡.07 .08 ¡.18 — 6. Attention control ¡.03 ¡.06 .10 ¡.22y .76*** — 7. Inhibitory control .05 ¡.06 .06 ¡.16 .62*** .45*** — 8. Activation control .04 ¡.10 .03 ¡.20 .76*** .68*** .38** — 9. Reading comprehension ¡.17 .27* .20 .00 .21 .17 ¡.01 .17 — 10. Written expression ¡.14 .31** .23y ¡.03 .27* .32** .12 .23y .48*** — 11. Semestral score of literacy ¡.08 .21 .37** ¡.06 .26* .22y .13 .23* .49*** .60*** — Descriptive Statistics M — 10.77 102.29 3.11 3.46 3.49 3.43 3.46 76.42 65.58 88.1 SD — 0.27 10.77 0.77 0.58 0.66 0.67 0.81 11.66 12.38 7.75

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THE JOURNAL OF EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH 171

effortful control was positively and marginally associated with written expression, r(70) D .32, p < .01, and semestral literacy test grades; r(70) D .22, p D .065. Activation control was mar- ginally and significantly associated positively with written expression and semestral literacy test grades, rs(70) D .23 and .23, ps D .054 and .047, respectively.

Regression analyses Three hierarchical regression equations were created to predict each of the three indicators of literacy proficiency, including reading comprehension, written expression, and semestral liter- acy test grades. Given that gender and IQ were previously cor- related with children’s literacy ability, and the children’s ages were correlated with literacy ability, all three variables were entered as control variables at Step 1 in each of the regressions. In Step 2, frustration, overall effortful control, the three compo- nents of effortful control (attention control, inhibitory control, and activation control) were entered. Then, the interaction var- iables of frustration and global effortful control, along with the three components of effortful control, were respectively entered in Step 3.

Results

Predicting the contribution of frustration and effortful control on reading comprehension

Table 2 presents the contribution of frustration, global effortful control, and the three components of effortful control on read- ing comprehension. As can be seen, the control variables of gender, age, and nonverbal IQ made unique contributions to reading ability in any of the four regressions at Step 1. These variables respectively accounted for 19% of the variance, F(3, 68) D 5.24, p D .003. Gender (b D –.24), t(71) D –2.13, p D .037; age (b D .33), t(71) D 2.94, p D .001; and nonverbal IQ (b D .31), t(71) D 2.66, p D .01; significantly positively predicted children’s reading comprehension in the four models.

After considering the effects of the three variables, we found that effortful control, attention control, inhibitory control, and activation control had no significant contributions (bs D .19, .15, .01, and .20, respectively; ps > .09), and that frustration had no significant association with reading comprehension.

Further results for the reading comprehension model indi- cated that there was a marginally significant two-way interac- tion between frustration and effortful control (b D –.20), t(71) D ¡1.91; DR2 D .04; F(1, 65) D 3.63, p D .061. As depicted in Figure 1, the relation between effortful control and reading comprehension was positive and stronger for lower frustration children (b D .42), t(71) D 2.62, p D .011. However, among children with high levels of frustration, effortful control was not significantly predictive of reading comprehension (b D .14), t(71) D 0.89, p D ns. The results indicated that a low-level, frustration with high effortful control ameliorated children’s reading comprehension.

Further results for the reading comprehension model indi- cated that there was a two-way interaction between frustration and attention control (b D –.36), t(71) D –3.48; DR2 D .12, F(1, 65) D 12.10, p < .01. The interaction variable significantly added to the regression model (12%). As depicted in Figure 2,

attention control was positively predictive of reading compre- hension among children with low frustration. However, the simple slope analysis showed that such a difference was not sig- nificant (bs D .11 and .15), ts(71) D 0.28 and 1.37, p D ns.

Prediction of frustration and effortful control on written expression

Written expression was regressed against the variables that were entered in blocks, similar to the reading comprehension variable. Table 3 shows the results of the hierarchical regression analysis for predicting written expression. Similar to the results of reading comprehension, the control variables of gender, age, and nonverbal IQ made unique contributions to written expression in any of the four regressions at Step 1. These mod- els accounted for 22%, F(3, 68) D 6.23, p < .01, of the variance. Gender (b D –.22), t(71) D –2.01, p D .049; age (b D .36), t(71) D 3.35, p D .001; and nonverbal IQ at Grade 1 (b D .32), t(71) D 2.93, p D .005; significantly positively predicted children’s written expression in the four models.

After considering the above variables, frustration and global effortful control, attention control, and activation control of effortful control all added a significant amount of variance to these three models (7%, 9%, and 7%; bs D .25, .32, and .26), ts (71) D 2.34, 2.82, and 2.39, ps D .022, .006, and .02, respec- tively. Children who had higher levels of effortful control, attention control, and activation control also had better written expression skills. However, the frustration and inhibitory con- trol did not have a significant effect. Further results from Step 3 for the written expression model indicated that there was no significant two-way interaction between frustration and global effortful control and the three components of effortful control.

Prediction of frustration and effortful control on the semestral literacy test grades

Table 4 shows the contribution of frustration and effortful con- trol in predicting the semestral literacy test grades. Results showed that children’s age and nonverbal IQ were two major contributors to the children’s semester literacy test grades. However, the children’s gender did not have a significant asso- ciation with their grades. Frustration, inhibitory control, and attention control did not have a significant predictive effect on children’s semestral literacy test grades; in comparison, global effortful control and activation control had significant associa- tion with semestral literacy test grades (bs D .22 and .24), ts (71) D 2.09 and 2.28, ps D .04 and .026, respectively. The two- way interaction effect between frustration and effortful control or any component was not proven.

Discussion

The goal of this study was to investigate whether children’s per- ceptions of their effortful control and frustration may predict their literacy proficiency. The key findings revealed that children with higher effortful control perception had better literacy abili- ties, particularly writing and language academic achievement. The association of effortful control components with children’s literacy proficiency also proved to be dependent on literacy

S.-Y. HUANG AND L.-L. YEH172

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indicators. Attention control positively predicted children’s writ- ing ability. Activation control also had a direct association with writing ability and semestral language academic performance after controlling the basic variables. Meanwhile, no significant association of inhibitory control and any indicator of literacy pro- ficiency was found. In addition, dispositional frustration had no direct predictive effect on preadolescents’ literacy proficiency; however, frustration moderated the predictive effect of attention control on children’s reading comprehension.

Role of effortful control in the development of literacy proficiency

In terms of the first research question, the results showed that preadolescents’ overall perceptions about their behaviors and attention regulation did account for the unique variance in writing- and literacy-related academic achievements in task- directed performance, even when children’s gender, age, and IQ were controlled. In line with previous studies (e.g., Valiente et al., 2008; Zhou et al., 2010), the results implied that effortful control perception was closely associated with children’s ability to perform effectively in school. In addition, consistent with previous studies (e.g., Ylvisaker & DeBonis, 2000), the results indicated that written expression and semestral literacy test seemed more closely associated with intentional control than receptive reading tasks for preadolescents, given that the per- formance on writing and semestral grading both significantly related to global effortful control. In other words, the results

suggested that different underlying mechanisms of reading, writing, or taking a literacy exam may require different compo- nents or levels of effortful control to perform well.

Association between effortful control components and indicators of literacy proficiency

Regarding the second research question, our results showed that the specific component of effortful control was associated with the different indicators of literacy proficiency. However, only attention control and activation control were closely tied to literacy ability for early adolescents. The results implied that during expressive written tasks, if a preadolescent pays enough attention and repeatedly activates his or her focus on the tasks at hand, he or she may have a greater chance of achieving a bet- ter performance in the writing assignment or literacy exam. In addition, a possible reason for the absence of a significant rela- tionship between any literacy indicators and inhibitory control may be the matureness of inhibitory control for high-grade pupils who had already adapted to task-conducting situations (Eisenberg et al., 2005; Williams, Ponesse, Schacha, Logan, & Tannock, 1999); thus, more inhibitory control would not be linked to their performance on either the literacy assessment or literacy exam. It was also possible that inhibitory control had an indirect predictive effect on academic performance through social and motivation processes (Valiente et al., 2008).

Relative contribution of dispositional frustration on literacy proficiency

Finally, in terms of the third research question, the significant linkage between frustration and attention control, and a mar- ginal moderator of global effortful control on reading compre- hension, were found in the study. Given that inhibitory control and activation control relates to the regulation of impulsive behaviors and those involved in stressful situations, and less related to the adjustment of the emotion itself; therefore, no direct association of frustration was expected. The results sug- gest that anger-frustration related to the disfluency of reading (e.g., Zhou et al., 2010) or children’s goal for reading is mis- matched to their academic assignments and texts (Graesser & D’Mello, 2012), which is more likely to impede the positive association between attention regulation and reading compre- hension. The results support the notion that the indirect model (Blair, 2002) is valuable in understanding the mechanism of which emotion correlates with children’s literacy ability and academic achievement. In addition, the finding also supports the assumptions that the efficiency of effortful control depends on the strength of the dominant response or the strength of emotion reactivity (Rothbart & Hwang, 2005), and that nega- tive emotion may be associated with lower academic achieve- ment by disrupting subject’s cognitive resources (Blair, 2002; Rice et al., 2007).

Clinical implications

The findings of this study have implications on the importance of facilitating children’s development of effortful control, par- ticularly attention control and activation control so that their

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S.-Y. HUANG AND L.-L. YEH174

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THE JOURNAL OF EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH 175

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S.-Y. HUANG AND L.-L. YEH176

literacy proficiency may have a greater chance to be improved correspondingly. For preadolescents, school psychologists may target improving their attention control and activation control which would be therefore associated with their performances in tasks requiring complicated processing, such as writing. Sec- ond, school speech-language therapists may screen out those preadolescents with poorer reading skills and teach them useful strategies of reading to improve their reading skills, thus, there would be a greater chance to reduce their frustration and enhance their ability to maintain their attention level while studying. Finally, the children with high levels of frustration may be screened so that they can be taught by teachers and school psychologists different strategies on managing their anger/frustration. These may be beneficial and relate to their better performance in literacy efficacy and academic performance.

Limitations and further research directions

An important limitation of this study is its concurrent meas- urements of preadolescents’ effortful control, frustration, and literacy ability; it therefore lacks information on the direction among these factors. A longitudinal study is suggested to trace the cause-effect relationships among effortful control, negative emotions and preadolescents’ literacy performance. Second, even though the preadolescents’ perceptions of their effortful control and disposition frustration are important, we suggest the addition of at least one direct behavior measure of effortful control and frustration level of preadolescents in further studies.

Conclusion

In conclusion, children with higher effortful control perceptions had better literacy ability, particularly writing and language aca- demic achievement. The association between effortful control components and children’s literacy proficiency is dependent on literacy indicators. Moreover, frustration moderates the predic- tive effect of attention control on children’s reading comprehen- sion. Cultivating preadolescents’ ability to self-regulate and providing certain interventions might improve the possibility of better literacy proficiency for preadolescents.

Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to all children, parents, and teachers who took part in the study for their participation and support.

Funding

This study was supported by a grant from Mackay Medical College (no. 1021A02).

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