The Cursive Task: A New Measure of Children's Persistence during a Mundane Task

Nate McQueen Author

08/02/2021 Added

6 Plays

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My research involves the development of a coding scheme and an analysis of data regarding a persistence measure.

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[00:00:01.830]Hello, and welcome to my UCARE presentation. My name is Nate McQueen,
[00:00:05.880]and I'm a senior psychology major conducting research in the Learning and
[00:00:09.540]Development Research Lab (LADR).
[00:00:11.340]And today I'll be presenting my research regarding The Cursive Task:
[00:00:14.490]A New Measure of Children's Persistence during a Mundane Task
[00:00:19.350]To begin,
[00:00:19.980]persistence can be defined as the quality or state of maintaining a course of
[00:00:24.360]action or keeping at a task and finishing it
[00:00:27.300]despite the obstacles such as opposition or discouragement or the effort
[00:00:31.440]involved. There are two main ways to measure persistence.
[00:00:35.280]The first is through questionnaires by self report,
[00:00:37.770]parent report, or teacher report.
[00:00:40.170]And the second method is by task-based measures,
[00:00:42.660]which is how we gathered our data regarding persistence.
[00:00:47.400]In order to gather data,
[00:00:48.570]we had to come up with a coding scheme for our mundane task.
[00:00:51.900]We did this by modifying coding schemes, using a previous study where a child,
[00:00:56.580]two to five years of age, attempted to open a tricky lock on a box.
[00:01:01.170]The children in our study were seven to eight years of age
[00:01:03.900]so we wanted to select a task that was more developmentally appropriate.
[00:01:07.980]We chose cursive because it was a boring task that children would typically do
[00:01:11.520]in a classroom, but also a task that could provide some challenge for them.
[00:01:15.600]Our overall goal was to develop a coding scheme
[00:01:17.940]to measure persistence in an unsupervised classroom setting with a focus
[00:01:21.810]primarily on the ability to stay on task during a mundane task.
[00:01:28.050]The child was handed tracing sheets of letters,
[00:01:30.540]A to Z and told that they could work for as long as they wanted.
[00:01:34.110]The assessor explains that they need to prepare for the rest of the assessment
[00:01:37.560]outside of the room and they say that they will return in seven minutes.
[00:01:43.740]Here we can see the lab space where this would be conducted.
[00:01:46.710]The child would sit in the furthest chair while the cameras would observe their
[00:01:50.130]behavior. Notice on the right-hand side of the photo,
[00:01:53.580]the temptation for the child to be drawn to this shelf of toys.
[00:01:58.590]Here's an example from one of our assessments where a child was tracing capital
[00:02:02.220]A's and lowercase a's.
[00:02:04.500]This is the same template for all the sheets from A to Z with one letter per
[00:02:08.310]page.
[00:02:12.180]I was able to gather a variety of quantitative, qualitative, and demographic data
[00:02:16.680]from this task. For coding
[00:02:18.930]the videos we use 15 second epochs with three codes.
[00:02:22.620]A 1 was off task activity. A 2 was off task,
[00:02:25.950]no activity. And a 3 was on task engaged.
[00:02:30.150]Some quantitative data included the number of times they stopped and restarted
[00:02:34.470]the task.
[00:02:35.400]The percentage of time spent off task, and the number of pages that they
[00:02:39.510]completed, as well as the percentage of time spent in each epoch.
[00:02:44.160]The qualitative data was a variety of behaviors
[00:02:46.920]they engaged in throughout the task.
[00:02:49.410]And our demographic data was the gender of the children
[00:02:54.120]For our data, we had 40 participants,
[00:02:56.610]26 were boys and 14 were girls.
[00:03:00.210]For the number of restarts,
[00:03:01.670]we had a mean of 1.08, a standard deviation of 1.4, and a
[00:03:06.550]range of zero to five.
[00:03:09.430]For percentage of time off task,
[00:03:12.820]we had a mean of 33%, standard deviation of 34%,
[00:03:17.980]and a range of zero to 97%. For the number of pages completed
[00:03:22.750]we had a mean of 1.7, a standard deviation of 0.92,
[00:03:28.030]and a range of 0.05 to 4.
[00:03:31.570]As for our percentage of time off-task activity,
[00:03:34.930]you had a mean of 28.21%,
[00:03:36.700]a standard deviation of 34.68%,
[00:03:40.760]and a range of zero to 94%.
[00:03:44.740]As for our percentage of time off-task no activity,
[00:03:47.590]we had a mean of 6.41%, a standard deviation of 9.3%,
[00:03:51.460]and a range of zero to 45%.
[00:03:56.110]Finally, for our percentage of time on task,
[00:03:58.420]we had a mean of 65.37%, a standard deviation of
[00:04:02.770]33.2%, and a range of 6 to 100%.
[00:04:09.430]On average, children restarted the task once and children spend most of the time
[00:04:14.410]on task, though there's significant variability between children.
[00:04:19.660]If children did go off task,
[00:04:21.700]they are more likely to engage in activities such as playing with toys or
[00:04:25.390]walking around the room rather than be off task and unactive such as resting
[00:04:30.070]their head on the table or shaking out their hands.
[00:04:36.190]There are a wide range of behaviors that I observed during our task.
[00:04:40.120]Some of the common behaviors are listed here such as looking around the room or
[00:04:43.990]directly at the cameras, stretching or shaking out their hand,
[00:04:48.490]flipping through the pages, or talking to oneself, or humming to oneself
[00:04:55.780]Looking ahead, we have another 100 videos to code to add to our data.
[00:05:00.160]Our long-term goal is to make sure that we have established reliability to make
[00:05:03.820]sure that our codes are consistent.
[00:05:06.460]We also hope to validate the task to make sure it is measuring what it is
[00:05:09.730]supposed to measure in order for other researchers to use our task and gather
[00:05:14.020]further data on persistence.
[00:05:16.600]We hope to have kids returned for future assessments to measure academic
[00:05:20.170]achievement,
[00:05:20.860]to investigate the association between persistence and future academic
[00:05:24.790]achievement.
[00:05:26.290]This data is a starting point to understanding how persistence is relevant
[00:05:30.070]in an educational context.
[00:05:34.300]I'd like to give a special thank you to Dr. Finch,
[00:05:36.850]Kimia, and the Learning and Development Research Lab (LADR),
[00:05:39.580]as well as the families who participated in our research.
[00:05:43.870]And thank you for listening.

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The Cursive Task: A New Measure of Children's Persistence during a Mundane Task

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