Attributions for success and failure
As you might suspect, the way that these attributions combine affects students’ academic motivations in major ways. It usually helps bothmotivation and achievement if a student attributes academic successes and failures to factors that are internal and controllable, such as effort or achoice to use particular learning strategies (Dweck, 2000). Attributing successes to factors that are internal but stable or controllable (likeability), on the other hand, is both a blessing and a curse: sometimes it can create optimism about prospects for future success (“I always dowell”), but it can also lead to indifference about correcting mistakes (Dweck, 2006), or even create pessimism if a student happens not to perform atthe accustomed level (“Maybe I’m not as smart as I thought”). Worst of all for academic motivation are attributions, whether stable or not,related to external factors. Believing that performance depends simply on luck (“The teacher was in a bad mood when marking”) or on excessivedifficulty of material removes incentive for a student to invest in learning. All in all, then, it seems important for teachers to encourage internal, controllableattributions about success.
Influencing students’ attributions
How can they do so? One way or another, the effective strategies involve framing teachers’ own explanations of success and failure around internal,controllable factors. Instead of telling a student: “Good work! You’re smart!”, try saying: “Good work! Your effort reallymade a difference, didn’t it?” If a student fails, instead of saying,“Too bad! This material is just too hard for you,” trysaying, “Let’s find a strategy for practicing this more, and then you can try again.” In both cases the first option emphasizesuncontrollable factors (effort, difficulty level), and the second option emphasizes internal, controllable factors (effort, use of specific strategies).
Such attributions will only be convincing, however, if teachers provide appropriate conditions for students to learn—conditions in whichstudents’ efforts really do pay off. There are three conditions that have to be in place in particular. First, academic tasks and materials actually haveto be at about the right level of difficulty. If you give problems in advanced calculus to a first-grade student, the student will not only fail them but alsobe justified in attributing the failure to an external factor, task difficulty. If assignments are assessed in ways that produce highly variable, unreliablemarks, then students will rightly attribute their performance to an external, unstable source: luck. Both circumstances will interfere with motivation.
Second, teachers also need to be ready to give help to individuals who need it—even if they believe that an assignment is easy enough or clear enoughthat students should not need individual help. Readiness to help is always essential because it is often hard to know in advance exactly how hard a taskwill prove to be for particular students. Without assistance, a task that proves difficult initially may remain difficult indefinitely, and the studentwill be tempted to make unproductive, though correct, attributions about his or her failure (“I will never understand this”, “I’m notsmart enough”, or “It doesn’t matter how hard I study”).