The Effect of Competence-Building Narrative on Chinese Adolescents’ Persistence

Persistence is one of the most critical aspects of learning motivation, but little attention has been paid to persistence intervention in the literature. The current study took a perspective from narrative psychology to examine the effect of narrative form on junior middle school students’ ability to persist. Thirty-two students were randomly assigned to the experimental group of competence-building narrative and the control group. While all the students constructed past experiences of success and failure, those in the experimental group were prompted to think from a competence-building perspective. Then both groups solved a figure-based problem, within which the researcher recorded their number of attempts and time spent. Results showed that those who construct past success and failure from a competence-building perspective attempted more times and spent more time on the unsolvable problem.