Learning requires effort, but children cannot try hard at everything. Here, we evaluated whether children use their improvement over time to decide whether to stick with a challenge. To eliminate the effect of individual differences in ability or prior knowledge, we created a novel paradigm that allowed us to surreptitiously control children's performance. Across three preregistered experiments (N = 319, ages 4 to 6 in the United States), we found that children who were given evidence that their performance was improving were more likely to persist on a challenging task than children who were given evidence that their performance was constant, even when final performance was matched. This effect was robust to differing reward contingencies, across in-person and online testing contexts, and was driven by the demotivating effect of constant performance. Our results suggest that young children will be more persistent if they are guided away from too-difficult tasks and toward opportunities that enable steady growth. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

中文翻译：

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幼儿根据他们的表现轨迹来校准努力。

学习需要付出努力，但孩子不能事事努力。在这里，我们评估了孩子们是否利用他们随着时间的推移而取得的进步来决定是否坚持挑战。为了消除能力或先验知识方面的个体差异的影响，我们创造了一种新的范式，使我们能够暗中控制儿童的表现。在三个预先注册的实验中（N = 319，美国 4 至 6 岁），我们发现，与获得证据证明其表现正在改善的儿童相比，获得证据证明其表现正在改善的儿童更有可能坚持完成一项具有挑战性的任务是恒定的，即使最终性能匹配。这种影响对于不同的奖励意外事件是稳健的，跨越面对面和在线测试环境，并被持续表现的消极影响所驱动。我们的结果表明，如果引导幼儿远离过于艰巨的任务，转向能够稳定成长的机会，他们会更加坚持不懈。（PsycInfo 数据库记录 (c) 2023 APA，保留所有权利）。