Over the past fifty years, extensive research has examined the influence of causal attributions on cognitions, emotions, and behaviours in educational contexts. However, these studies often relied on inferences about dimensional properties of attributions, and not on students' perceptions of them. This study innovates by directly assessing these…

This study aims to investigate Turkish EFL learners' attributions for success and failure in speaking English, and to find out whether gender and department variables exert any impact on their attributions. The attributions were analyzed and compared in terms of the four dimensions: locus of causality, external control, stability and personal…

Causal attributions (explanations for outcomes) have been found to predict college students' academic success; however, not all students attributing success or failure to adaptive (i.e., controllable) causes perform well in university. Eccles et al.'s ("Achievement and achievement motives." W.H. Freeman, San Francisco, pp 75-145, 1983)…

This action research aims to identify the teacher trainees' attributions for their failure, their locus of control and their achievement goals as a result of high failure rate in "Teaching English to Young Learners" course at a large state university in Turkey. For this purpose, qualitative and quantitative data were gathered via an…

Students' beliefs about why they may or may not be successful in various pursuits can influence the extent to which they are likely to invest effort in these pursuits and which in turn affects the level of achievement likely to be experienced. Attributional beliefs assign causes for success and failure to a range of factors, including ability,…

This study examined the determinants of attributions for success or failure in stopping smoking in a self-help treatment program with and without a drug component. Subjects (N=137) were randomly assigned to one of three experimental conditions: (1) nicotine gum and a self-help manual with an intrinsic motivational orientation; (2) self-help manual…

Patterns of academic attributions, developed by 225 hearing impaired college students to explain success or failure, closely resembled those of hearing students. The internal factors of ability and effort received the strongest attributional ratings for success, whereas the external and unstable factor or luck received the weakest rating.…

This study directly examined gender differences in the perception of the dimensional properties of causal attributions using a non-academic setting. Participants were 77 employees (31 males, 46 females) of four local financial institutions in Oklahoma. Questionnaires presented a success or failure scenario within either an affiliation (compliment…

Perceived locus of causality is an important factor in assessing the impact of prior success or failure on later performance. In order to examine the effects of internal (self) versus external (partner) attributions on subsequent performance, two studies were conducted. In the first study 80 female undergradutes worked on a series of mazes with an…

Showed that men used more ability attributions on a digit guessing task and women stressed ability for failure. Those more successful on the task reported using more ability, effort, and luck ascriptions. Only in relation to subjective outcome for effort did sex identity add information beyond sex of subject. (Author)

A previous study examined determinants of attributions for success or failure in stopping smoking in a self-help treatment program with and without a drug component. This follow-up study examined the attributions that successful quitters made after remaining abstinent through 12 months, or after they relapsed. Subjects (N=137) had been assigned to…

Attempts to assess whether social learning or attributional theory best accounts for expectancies of future success in college students (N=159) with a modification of a task used by Weiner and Kukla (1970). Results indicated partial support for elements of both the social learning and attribution theories. (LLL)

Thirty-six teachers and 162 elementary children in classes for specific learning difficulties (SLD) participated in a five week classroom attribution training program in one of three groups: mild frustration, success only, and control. Experimental training resulted in significant increase in ask persistence; no changes were noted in achievement…

College subjects undertook nine cognitive tasks with different perceived sex linkages, stating their expectancy of success before performance and attributing causality for their perceived performance after each task. Results indicated that (1) females hold lower expectancies of success than males and (2) perceived sex linkage of the task also…

A structural model of the consequences of success attributions--derived from B. Weiner's attribution model--was tested using 208 first-term college students. Although the hypothesized model was rejected based on a chi-square, goodness-of-fit test, a specification search yielded a model that fit the data and was consistent with Weiner's theory.…