After reviewing various studies of different national attitudes toward concepts of war and peace, the author describes a Finnish research project which used fantasy essays written by fifth-, seventh-, and ninth-grade pupils to identify the pupils' war images and to relate their war and peace attitudes to their behavior. (MF)

Performance and persistence on the Concealed Figures Test and the Embedded Figures Test decreased: (1) after short-duration failure when subjects were falsely led to attribute failure to task difficulty; and (2) after long-duration failure when subjects were falsely led to attribute failure to lack of ability. (CP)

High, neutral, and low statements of success expectancy were paired with positive and negative success feedback statements in a reading comprehension experiment. Incongruent combinations such as high success expectancy--negative feedback produced higher comprehension than congruent combinations. Results were interpreted by arousal and attribution…

College students attributed their own performance and the performance of the average student to ability, test difficulty, preparation, and luck. Successful students perceived internal factors and unsuccessful students perceived external factors as more important causes of their own performance. Students' anxiety and their ratings of the course and…

Tested effects on psychological development of mathematics tutoring program involving 15 high school girl tutors paired with elementary school girls. Found tutors improved both on conceptual maturity and value judgment. Found elementary girls improved on mathematics achievement test and measures of success attribution with control group showing…

The following five reasons for failure to use learning strategies are discussed: poor cognitive monitoring, primitive routines that yield a product, a meager knowledge base, attributions and classroom goals that do not support strategy use, and minimal transfer. A theory of settings must be considered to address these issues. (TJH)

Examines teachers' choices of most and least successful students in terms of mathematics test scores. Teachers were most inaccurate when selecting most successful boys. Teachers tended to relate success to ability with boys and to effort with girls. (Author/YP)

Explores the relationships between gender, sex typing, and attributional patterns in exam performance in a college classroom. Uses an attributional pretest and posttest and the Bem Sex Role Inventory with a sample of 85 male and 52 female students. Finds that gender and sex typing both affect attributions, but in different ways. (FMW)

Grade-level and achievement-level differences were studied in control-related beliefs and relations between students' beliefs and their reading and writing achievement for 364 students in grades 4, 7, and 10. Results suggest that beliefs characteristic of particular achievement levels are not simply reflections of age or grade level. (SLD)

Tested three alternative hypotheses regarding intergroup attribution patterns derived from the ethnocentric, the asymmetrical, and the stereotype-based models of intergroup attribution. Results from 582 junior high students in Israel show that members of majority and minority groups made internal attributions for stereotype-consistent positive…

Studied attributional biases in close relationships. Found that partner attributions prevail at the abstract level of adjectives, whereas self-attributions resided at the concrete level of action verbs. Findings underscore language's importance in attributional biases and reveal how people talk in less abstract terms about the self than about…

Three models of achievement motivation in the classroom are contrasted. Results with 155 high school students suggest that the model of C. S. Dweck and E. S. Elliott offers a better explanation of the relationships among achievement motivation, attributions, emotional reactions, expectancies, and performance than do the other models. (SLD)

Determines the relative degree of five personal (academic) attributes and five motivational variables found in a sample of successful Mexican American students. Subjects possessed all five personal attributes and four of the motivational variables. Concludes that Mexican American students possessing these attributes and variables can enjoy…

How self-serving bias affects evaluations of college courses was tested for 691 students by comparing a model predicting that evaluations reflect actual grades with a model predicting that evaluations reflect confirmation or disconfirmation of expectations. Results support course evaluation validity by indicating a minimal effect of self-serving…

Undergraduate students (n=480) responded to a vignette describing a sexual interaction between a father and daughter (either 7 or 15 years old). More causal and moral responsibility was attributed to victims who responded passively. Older victims were perceived to be more morally responsible than younger victims but only in situations involving…