The Revised Individualized Moderately Challenging Mastery Tasks for 15- to 48-month-old Children
The Revised Individualized Moderately Challenging Mastery Tasks for 15- to 48-month-old Children

Summary/Abstract: Mastery motivation is an under-assessed resiliency factor that helps all children achieve their potential. Children with developmental delay(s) (DD) have been rated lower by mothers on mastery motivation than children developing typically, but no group differences have been found when using individualized moderately challenging mastery tasks. Thus, it is important to have good individualized behavioral measures of mastery motivation. This article introduces the revised individualized moderately challenging mastery tasks for 15- to 48-month-old children; it includes the testing methods, psychometric properties, descriptive data about these mastery motivation tasks in children with DD, and clinical implications. This individualized mastery task method has shown good scoring reliability and acceptable evidence for convergent and divergent validity and is a useful tool for assessing mastery motivation for children with DD, and probably for children who are developing typically. This test may be helpful to facilitate the separation of developmental ability from motivation for each child. Suggestions for caregiver scaffolding of mastery motivation are also provided. Furthermore, caregivers and early childhood interventionists can learn how to improve a child’s mastery motivation.

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