Direct assessment of self-regulation
To assess children’s SR, we employed the Head-Toes-Knees-Shoulders task (HTKS; McClelland et al., 2014), a direct assessment measure widely used for this purpose. This task comprises three parts: in the initial phase, children were instructed to touch their heads when directed to touch their toes and vice versa. In the second phase, we introduced an additional command: children were asked to touch their knees when instructed to touch their shoulders and vice versa. All four commands were presented in a shuffled sequence in the third phase. Each part consisted of 10 items, scoring ranging from 0 for an incorrect response to 2 for a correct response, with 1 point for self-corrected responses. Consequently, the total score spanned from 0 to 60. In this study, it presented good reliability with α of 0.76. The assessment process is consistent with social emotions and mathematics above.