Attributional Retraining

Bernard Weiner's attribution theory proposes that people look for causes to help understand the outcomes and events in their lives, particularly ones that are important, negative, or unexpected. These reasons can be internally attributed meaning they are caused by some internal characteristic such as personality, motives, or beliefs. They can also be externally attributed meaning that they are caused by some situation or event that a person has no control over. What people attribute their success or failure to in a given situation determines the amount of effort they are willing to exert in a similar situation in the future. A technique called attributional retraining (AR) directly addresses this theory. During AR participants learn about the advantages of adopting personally controllable, causal attributions as opposed to uncontrollable, maladaptive attributions following poor performance. In the educational setting, AR is designed to replace a student’s damaging intrinsic attributions to explain his academic performance with explanations that will sustain motivation.

The purpose of this study was to examine the effectiveness of attributional retraining on performance and mastery motivation among first-year college students and to determine the extent to which AR affects academic achievement. They hypothesized that the students that did not receive AR would exhibit decreased motivation in both performance and mastery motivation over the course of the year. They also hypothesized that the subjects that received AR would exhibit increased mastery motivation but would show little to no change in performance motivation. They expected that the increased mastery motivation would have a direct positive effect the subjects academic