A Study On Characteristics Of Mastery Motivation And The Effect Of Behavior Evaluation On It In 3-Year-Old Children

Seventy one 3-year-old children were tested in situational experiments by three game tasks, which were exploration-feedback, problem-solving, and challenge-preference. The first one adopted a 2 (mastery condition: feedback/ no feedback) * 2(evaluative condition: positive evaluation/ no evaluation) two-factor between-subject design. And the second and third one both adopted one-factor (evaluative condition: positive evaluation/ no evaluation) between-subject design. The purpose was to examine the general characteristics of mastery motivation and the effect of behavior evaluation on it. It has been found that:(1) For the exploration-feedback: The average time of exploration reached more than 7.5 minutes and the overall interest and pleasure were high. The effect of mastery condition on exploratory time was significant but not on interest and pleasure, which manifested longer exploration in feedback condition than no feedback. The effect of behavior evaluation on pleasure was significant but not on exploratory time and interest, which manifested higher pleasure with positive evaluation than no evaluation.(2) For the problem-solving: The effect of behavior evaluation on task results and time was not significant. But the effect of task results on interest and pleasure was significant, which manifested higher interest and pleasure for success than failure, more positive emotion for success and more negative emotion for failure. Moreover, the effect of behavior evaluation on emotion was significant, which manifested higher interest for success and less negative emotion for failure with positive evaluation than no evaluation.(3) For challenge-preference: 94.4% of all children would carry out the task. They could persist for a long time to complete it from central tendency, but large individual differences from discrete degree. Similar to the second task, the effect of behavior evaluation on the task results and time was also not significant. The emotion for success and failure was significant,but the effect of evaluation and time on it was not. Maybe the emotion about challenge tasks mainly depended on the results rather than other factors.(4) There was no significant gender difference for all above.