School of Education & Information Studies, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA.
Department of Psychiatry, UCLA School of Medicine, Los Angeles, CA 90024, USA.
J Exp Child Psychol. 2021 Aug;208:105141. doi: 10.1016/j.jecp.2021.105141. Epub 2021 Apr 13.
Task persistence is an important learning-related behavior associated with academic success. Although persistence has been related to motivational beliefs and cognitive skills, these constructs are typically studied independently, limiting our understanding of relations among them. The current investigation was designed to understand how these concepts are related in early elementary school, a developmental period characterized by high motivational beliefs, growth in cognitive control, and the transition to school. Interest, perceived competence, and response inhibition were evaluated as predictors of children's (N = 73, M = 6.91 years) likelihood to demonstrate high persistence on a challenging puzzle task. Results provided evidence that motivational constructs are not sufficient for understanding differences in persistent behavior during this developmental period. Specifically, relations between interest and perceived competence and task persistence were present only for children with moderate to high response inhibition skills. Moreover, gender differences in task persistence emerged, indicating that although interest and perceived competence motivated all students to exhibit persistence, girls were still more likely to demonstrate task persistence than boys. Overall, findings suggest that task persistence in elementary school is a complex behavior that requires both cognitive control skills to support engagement and the motivation to continue engaging as task difficulty increases.
任务坚持是一种与学业成功相关的重要学习行为。尽管坚持与动机信念和认知技能有关，但这些结构通常是独立研究的，这限制了我们对它们之间关系的理解。目前的研究旨在理解这些概念在小学早期是如何相关的，这是一个动机信念高、认知控制能力增长和向学校过渡的发展时期。兴趣、感知能力和反应抑制被评估为预测儿童（N=73，M=6.91 岁）在具有挑战性的拼图任务中表现出高坚持性的可能性的因素。结果表明，在这个发展阶段，动机结构不足以理解坚持行为的差异。具体来说，只有具有中等到高反应抑制技能的儿童，兴趣和感知能力与任务坚持之间才存在关系。此外，任务坚持方面出现了性别差异，这表明尽管兴趣和感知能力激励所有学生表现出坚持性，但女孩比男孩更有可能表现出任务坚持性。总体而言，研究结果表明，小学阶段的任务坚持是一种复杂的行为，需要认知控制技能来支持参与，并在任务难度增加时保持参与的动机。
