ABSTRACT
The growing prominence of technology in modern life has paralleled the increased interest in understanding how people self-regulate within these contexts. This chapter defines the "problem space" of self-regulation in contexts, with numerous directions for future research identified. Meta-analyses allow for several ways of investigating whether the studies differ in quality, whether the pool of studies suffers from some kind of systematic bias, and whether there are important qualifiers of the relationships found in the literature. The executive functions of working memory, inhibition, and cognitive flexibility all support higher-order functions, including self-regulation as well as other processes. The empirical literature on self-regulation reveals it to be an important predictor of school readiness and academic success, whose effect upon performance throughout schooling is subject to dynamic interactions between personal, environmental, and contextual factors. Students' readiness for school, their interactions with others, and their academic performance are all directly and indirectly affected by their facility with self-regulation and SRL.
