Achievement motivation in the classroom and causal attributions

Abstract

This thesis examines aspects of achievement motivation in the classroom with reference to Bernard Weiner's model of the causal attributions, ability, effort, task difficulty and luck. The focus was on gender differences and competitive versus individualistic settings on success or failure of a peer-model. A gender-appropriate model was depicted as successful academically, socially and sport-wise in a series of activities at school and in the wider context of everyday life. The model was then shown to fail on a novel task. One half of the children were told that the failure had occurred in a competitive environment while the other half thought that it had occurred in an individualistic environment. Children expected to improve with practice with girls showing lower expectations of success on the novel task. The children rated ability and effort as being important to success whereas task difficulty and luck greatly increased in importance as reasons for failure. Task difficulty was more important to girls than to boys. In the individualistic condition effort was regarded as being more important and luck as less important than in the competitive condition. There was no difference between the girls and boys in their academic self-assessments. However, the boys overestimated themselves more than had the girls when ratings were compared with those of the class teachers. After seeing the model fail the children decreased their desire to be like the model. A qualitative analysis of children's allocation of feelings about failure if they had been the model, showed that the girls divided their feelings equally between positive and negative irrespective of whether they were in the competitive or individualistic condition. By comparison the boys more than doubled their negative feelings about failure in the competitive condition compared with those in the individualistic condition. All children named the model as their own gender indicating that the children had accepted the gender of the model as being the same as themselves. The research has supported the causal attribution theories covered in the text, with ability and effort being important to success and lack of them being significant in failure and the use of external attributions, in this instance task dificulty and luck, as reasons for failure. The accuracy of nine to ten year old children in assessing their own academic ability, as proposed by John Nicholls, is questioned. There is some evidence to suggest that an individualistic as opposed to a competitive environment, as proposed by Carole and Russell Ames and Martin Covington, is more conducive to girls feeling better about themselves academically.