Impact of parenting, reward, and prior achievement on task persistence

The purpose of this study was to test the impact of reward, prior achievement, parenting style, and parents' educational and income levels on second graders' task persistence in the face of a challenging task. The participants were 179 s graders enrolled in one of three public schools in the Şanlıurfa. Participants were randomly assigned to success, no-reward, and reward groups. On the pre- and posttest, participants' task persistence was measured through engagement with an unsolvable labyrinth puzzle. Stepwise multiple regression was calculated to predict students' task persistence based on students' gender, mother and father education, income, parenting styles, pretest results and experimental grouping (success, no-reward, reward). Regression analyses pointed only to reward as a significant predictor of students' task persistence. Students' task persistence decreased on average 421 s when a reward was removed. Task persistence for the success and no-reward groups was significantly higher than for the reward group.