Abstract: 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.
Keywords: narrative psychology, persistence, narrative intervention, adolescents, motivation