Poster #25 - Persistence during an Unmonitored Task: Associations with Elementary School Students’ Self-Regulation and Academic Skills

• In Event: Poster Session 04

Abstract

Persistence is under the broader umbrella of motivation and defined as children’s abilities to focus and persevere on a task despite challenges (Berhenke et al., 2011). Persistence on challenging tasks has been linked to academic success for children in the classroom (e.g., Bustamante et al., 2018; Jozsa & Morgan, 2014). Torgrimson and colleagues (2021) demonstrate that task persistence in elementary school students is a complex behavior that require both cognitive control to support engagement and motivation to continue engaging as task difficulty increases.

However, prior research has not examined variation in children’s persistence over the course of an unmonitored, challenging task. This current study examined how persistence changes over the course of an unmonitored challenging task and if persistence in an individual lab setting is related to children’s self-regulation and academic skills in the classroom.

We utilized a socioeconomically-diverse sample of 90 second-grade students who came in for a laboratory visit with a caregiver. Children completed a Picture Search task where they were asked to find objects on an I-Spy page. Some objects were present on the I-Spy page, while others were not. The child was left alone in the room for 7 minutes, with a shelf of enticing age-appropriate toys. Video data was taken at the time of assessment and behaviorally coded. In each 15-second epoch, children’s behavior was categorized into three mutually exclusive categories: “off-task with activity” (i.e., getting out of seat, wandering around the room,)” off-task, no activity” (i.e., pencil out of hand, looked around the room), “on-task” (i.e., focused and engaged in the picture search task.) Persistence was measured by the proportion of time spent “on-task” score and the amount of time until the child became off-task. Teachers reported on children’s self-regulation using The Behavior Rating Inventory of Executive Function (BRIEF-2, Gioia et al., 2015) and reading and mathematics skills (Nebraska State Standards) in the classroom.

Descriptive results highlight that children were generally persistent and stayed on-task for most of the activity. On average, children did not go off-task until 5.39 minutes into the 7-minute activity (see Table 1). As hypothesized, children’s persistence decreased over time as the task continued (see Table 2). On-task behaviors were also positively linked to children’s mathematics skills. Off-task behaviors with no activity (e.g., looking around, playing with pencil) were negatively associated with students' self-regulation and mathematics skills. Performance on the Picture Search activity was not linked to reading.

Results provide descriptive information on how children engage with a challenging task when unmonitored and evidence of the importance of persistence during unmonitored tasks for adaptive behaviors and learning in the classroom. Moreover, we demonstrate that behaviors during unmonitored tasks in a lab setting are related to children’s behaviors in the classroom. These results have implications for interventions for students who struggle to stay on-task while unmonitored. These students may benefit from process-based feedback, focused on children’s effort rather than ability, as well as clear instructions around how to re-engage attention during a challenging task.

Authors

• Isis Burks
  Presenting Author

• Jenna Elizabeth Finch, University of Nebraska - Lincoln