Motivation: behavioral and attribution theories

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”).

Third, teachers need to remember that ability—usually considered a relatively stable factor—often actually changes incrementally over the long term. Recognizing this fact is one of the best ways to bring about actual increases in students’ abilities (Blackwell, Trzniewski,&Dweck, 2007; Schunk, Pintrich,&Meese, 2008). A middle-years student might play the trumpet in the school band at a high level of ability, but thisability actually reflects a lot of previous effort and a gradual increase in ability. A second grade student who reads fluently, in this sense may have highcurrent ability to read; but at some point in the distant past that same student could not read as well, and even further back he may not have been ableto read at all. The increases in ability have happened at least in part because of effort. While these ideas may seem obvious, they can easily be forgotten inthe classroom because effort and ability evolve according to very different time frames. Effort and its results appear relatively immediately; a studentexpends effort this week, this day, or even at this very moment, and the effort (if not the results) are visible right away. But ability may take longer toshow itself; a student often develops it only over many weeks, months, or years.

References

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