Attributions and Motivation

Have you ever given or heard a really good excuse for not doing well at some task? Perhaps a student told you that they didn't have time to study or do homework because their grandparents took them out to dinner? Maybe watching the season finale of Glee was more important than preparing the reports for your boss, but you told him you weren't feeling well last night. These are known in the world of Educational Psychology as attributions. More specifically Timothy Seifert explains attributions in his article, Understanding Student Motivation, as the following, "An attribution refers to the perceived cause of an outcome; it is a person's explanation of why a particular event turned out as it did (e.g. pas or fail a test, win or lose a game). In an academic setting, typical attributions might include effort, skills and knowledge, strategies, ability, luck, the teacher's mood or mistakes by the teacher"(p. 138).

So how do attributions interact with student motivation? Well, the key term in Seifert's definition is perceived. However a student sees the situation in addition to previous success or failure may either strengthen or weaken their motivation. Take for instance a student who is high achieving and does well on a test, they will most likely attribute their success to internal factors such as being smart or good study habits and their expectancy for future performance will stay high. However if this student does poorly they may attribute it to not having time to study, but since they are generally a good student their future expectancy stays high. Next, take a habitual low achieving student. When he or she does well on a test, they may attribute it to external causes such as a tutors help and their future expectations will stay low or they may attribute it to internal causes such as doing homework and their future expectancy will increase. If this same low achieving student does poorly, he or she may attribute internal beliefs like they are not smart, and their future expectancy stays low. (These examples were taken from Motivation for Achievement, by M. Kay Alderman) My next question is, how motivated would you be if you believe you will perform poorly on the next test? Not too motivated right?

So what we as educators need to do is shift our students attributions to something that can be altered such as a study strategy or effort instead of an unchangeable factor such as smart or stupid. This is called attribution retraining. Alderman states, "Many of these change programs involve two stages: (a) students achieve success; and (b) following success, students are taught to attribute success to effort"(p. 55). If we can alter our students' perceptions about success and failure we may help them become more motivated in the face of academic challenges as well as life challenges.

After I read this chapter and article I found myself thinking about the students I have had throughout my career as an educator. I teach English as a foreign or second language and there are definitely times when I see the frustration build in my students because of continued failure and then they stop trying all together. I hear things like, "I am not smart enough to learn English" or, "English is too hard." I have always said that if they practice they will get it eventually. While effort is a key issue to learning languages, these reading made me see that I need to be giving my students better strategies to practice with. I need to be giving them keys to success so that they can attribute learning not only to effort but also productive strategies.