It’s OK to Fail: Individual and Dyadic Regulatory Antecedents of Mastery Motivation in Preschool

Abstract

Mastery motivation is closely related to children’s regulatory processes and is socialized by parents. However, we know little about how individual child and dyadic parent-child regulatory processes work together to foster the early development of mastery motivation in preschool. The present study examined dyadic persistence in parent-child interactions, children’s effortful control, and children’s successful versus failed attempts in a challenging object mastery task at age 3.5 years and their prediction of teacher ratings of object-oriented and social mastery motivation in preschool at a 4-month follow-up (N = 100). Path analytic models revealed that greater dyadic persistence during parent-child interactions predicted children’s higher levels of social mastery. A greater rate of both successful and failed attempts at a challenging task predicted children’s higher levels of object mastery. However, failed attempts were positively related to concurrent individual and dyadic regulatory measures, whereas successful attempts were not. Findings suggest that parent-child coregulation makes a significant contribution to mastery motivation development and that there may be distinct antecedents for object-oriented versus social forms of mastery motivation. Findings also suggest that a child’s early ability to persist in the face of failure may be an important predictor of mastery motivation in preschool.

Learning to let go: Parental over-engagement predicts poorer self-regulation in kindergartners.

“…This approach enables researchers to identify and examine the relevance of parental and child behavioral states that occur at the same time. In a sample of preschoolers, the degree to which parent–child dyads spent more time in stable co-regulated states predicted positive teacher ratings of social skills with adults and peers (Lunkenheimer & Wang, 2017). In a previous publication with the current sample, we showed that a state space measure of positive dyadic coregulation was significantly linked to teacher reports of children’s self-regulation, whereas global ratings of the same construct were not (Bardack et al, 2017).…”

Associations amongst response inhibition, motivational beliefs, and task persistence in early elementary school

“…As such, to narrow in on persistence in specific circumstances, researchers have employed behavioral measures including novel puzzles or trivia games to observe children's approaches to challenge (Smiley & Dweck, 1994). In these assessments, duration of time spent on task or number of failed attempts serve as measures of task persistence (Berhenke et al, 2011;Chang & Burns, 2005;Lunkenheimer & Wang, 2017;Mokrova et al, 2013). Using these methods, researchers have found that preschool children's persistence on a challenging puzzle task predicted behavioral assessment scores (Lunkenheimer & Wang, 2017) and teacher ratings of self-regulation (Berhenke et al, 2011), as well as performance on standardized measures of math, literacy, and language proficiency (Mokrova et al, 2013).…”

“…In these assessments, duration of time spent on task or number of failed attempts serve as measures of task persistence (Berhenke et al, 2011;Chang & Burns, 2005;Lunkenheimer & Wang, 2017;Mokrova et al, 2013). Using these methods, researchers have found that preschool children's persistence on a challenging puzzle task predicted behavioral assessment scores (Lunkenheimer & Wang, 2017) and teacher ratings of self-regulation (Berhenke et al, 2011), as well as performance on standardized measures of math, literacy, and language proficiency (Mokrova et al, 2013). Combined, these finding suggests that duration of persistence is a valid indicator of a child's early adaptive approach to learning and that longer engagement with a challenging, but achievable task benefits acquisition of academic material.…”

“…Broadly, cognitive control, often referred to as executive functions, involves the coordination of multiple cognitive subprocesses that help children set, plan, and achieve a taskrelated goal (Friedman & Miyake, 2017). Although studies have demonstrated associations between cognitive control and persistence, more often than not this work has relied on global ratings of children's persistence and cognitive control in the classroom as reported by their teachers (Berhenke et al, 2011;Lunkenheimer & Wang, 2017;Mokrova et al, 2013;Vitiello et al, 2011). While informative, teacher reports provide limited insight into the dynamic associations between motivational states and children's use of cognitive control skills when they are engaged in specific tasks.…”

“…To date, studies linking children's cognitive control processes to task persistence have relied on teacher reports of broad classroom behaviors such as general attention and engagement to characterize these skills (Berhenke et al, 2011;Li-Grining et al, 2010;Lunkenheimer & Wang, 2017;Vitiello et al, 2011;Vitiello & Greenfield, 2017). This study is one of the first to behaviorally assess children on both task persistence and cognitive control.…”