The motivational effects of failure were investigated. Students worked perceptual judgment problems, receiving varying levels of failure feedback on their work on unsolvable problems. Subjects assessed their success or failure at the task. Those who believed they had failed scored higher on a subsequent set of similar, but solvable, problems.…

Untrained normal achievers attributed failure to adoption of specific task strategies, while untrained learning disabled boys attributed failure to task difficulty. Characteristics of learned helplessness were apparent in the impaired performance of the learning-disabled boys. Normal achievers appeared to have developed active and independent…

Despite the support for the proposition that learning is enhanced by the reinforcement of correct responses, there remain learners who continue to fail when contingent reinforcement is administered, even though they may have the ability and be motivated to succeed. This condition, known as learned helplessness, presents a problem for instructional…

Studies in the past have shown that reinforcements independent of the subjects actions may induce a feeling of helplessness. Most experiments on learned helplessness have led researchers to believe that uncontrollability (non-contingency of feedback upon response) was the determining feature of learned helplessness, although in most studies…