"I want to keep going": Differential effects of storybooks on children's perseverance

Studies have shown that young children are more likely to persist on tasks when they are exposed to adults in their immediate environment who are persistent themselves. Here, we examined whether listening to three readily available commercial storybooks featuring perseverant characters would increase children's effort on difficult tasks. We worked with 154 children in Grades 2 and 3. Eighty-seven participants were randomly selected to hear storybooks that focused on overcoming adversity, while the remaining 67 students heard storybooks that focused on wordplay. Children in both groups were pretested, heard a different story each day for three days, and were posttested 24 h after storybook reading was complete. Each storybook read aloud included one vocabulary term appropriate to the stories' theme. Children completed target vocabulary assessments and challenging tasks (e.g., mazes, tangrams) at pre and posttest. Our results showed an adversity advantage. Namely, the Struggle group demonstrated significant increases in time-on-task, number of attempts, and accuracy across difficult tasks at posttest. We found that exposure to struggle-themed storybooks produced measurable gains in perseverance relative to an active control. Commercially available storybooks, when paired with explicit vocabulary instruction, offer educators and parents a simple, scalable tool to promote perseverance.