Professor Steven Howard is a Senior Academic Research Leader in Child Development and Education with the Department of Education at the University of Oxford.
Steven is a leading researcher of children’s self-regulation, executive function, and related abilities. He has published well-cited papers in leading journals regarding self-regulation and executive function meta-analyses and reviews, and on their development, antecedents, outcomes, intervention, and assessment. Currently, he is leading a longitudinal study of self-regulation across the transition to school years. He is also a founding Chief Investigator with the Centre of Excellence for the Digital Child, in which his research focuses on intersections between children’s self-regulation and digital engagement.
Steven had led the design and validation of internationally adopted measures of young children’s emerging abilities (e.g., executive function, self-regulation, numeracy, language). Collectively, these measures have been accessed by >20,000 users across 50+ countries and 5 continents, and have been translated into more than 16 languages. Steven has led and contributed to research seeking to leverage these insights about early child development and assessment to support children’s ongoing growth in foundational areas of development.
Steven is an Editorial Board member of a leading early childhood journal, Early Childhood Research Quarterly, and is an invited member of the Australian Research Council’s College of Experts. He has served in several advisory capacities for international governments, research teams, philanthropy, and industry related to early self-regulation, executive function, and assessment.