ABSTRACT: Children's ability to control their thoughts and behaviors is critical for school readiness and academic success. Children are constantly expected to pay attention, follow rules, and concentrate on various tasks. For young students, this means having to wait their turn to engage in activities, raise their hands before speaking, and resist becoming distracted by peers. Understanding how the early school context shapes the cognitive mechanisms underlying these behaviors is central to my research. Specifically, I study the development of executive function (EF) and self-regulatory abilities, and how they contribute to children's emerging academic skills during the transition to school. Grounded in an interdisciplinary developmental science perspective, and by employing longitudinal and experimental methodology, I will discuss three related lines of research related to EF development in the school context. In the first set of studies, I will present our recent efforts towards developing and validating a new set of school-based EF assessments in young children. The second line of research will focus on the importance of EF components, and their impact on children's academic achievement across development. I will also present our recent work examining the causal effect of preschool, and kindergarten on children's EF growth, using school cutoff, and regression discontinuity designs.