Tara L. Haynes

A Review of Attributional Retraining Treatments: Fostering Engagement and Persistence in Vulnerable College Students

Pursuing a university degree intermixes intellectual ability, content knowledge, emotional stamina, unflagging motivation, and goal striving with diverse learning environments. The academic aspirations of students, however, often belie the realities of unanticipated obstacles along the way that thwart eventual success. Motivation and performance can be undermined through unfamiliar and unpredictable learning experiences involving heightened competition, increased pressure to excel, more frequent failure, novel assignments, ineffective instruction, stringent grading practices, critical career choices, and new social networks. These situations can lead to a paradox of failure in which bright, enthusiastic, and capable students underperform in university, or quit outright. In response, various educational interventions have been developed by postsecondary institutions to rectify escalating attrition rates. Attributional retraining (AR) is a motivation-enhancing treatment designed to offset the dysfunctional explanatory thinking that can arise from unsatisfactory learning experiences. This chapter describes the theoretical framework and empirical evidence underpinning AR as an effective motivation treatment for assisting failure-prone students in higher education settings.

Attributional (Explanatory) Thinking about Failure in New Achievement Settings.

Attributional (explanatory) thinking involves the appraisal of factors that contribute to performance and is instrumental to motivation and goal striving. Little is understood, however, concerning attributional thinking when multiple causes are involved in the transition to new achievement settings. Our study examined such complex attributional thinking in the transition from high school to university, a shift from familiar to novel learning environments, in the context of Weiner’s attribution theory (1972, 1985, 1995, 2006). At the start of the academic year, students rated the extent to which each of six common attributions contributed to poor performance to ascertain their relative importance to each other. A fixed order of attributions was reported as contributing to poor performance that was identical across five independent cohorts of first-year students (effort, test difficulty, strategy, professor quality, ability, luck, respectively). Cluster analysis revealed that students differed in combining these attributions into clusters suggesting diminished or enhanced control over poor performance. These differences in attribution clusters were associated with cognitive and affective outcomes at the start of Term 1, and with course grades and GPA at the end of Term 2. Student differences in complex attributional thinking are discussed in terms of transitions to new achievement settings.RésuméLa pensée (explication) attributionnelle, impliquant l’appréhension des facteurs contribuant à la performance, participe de la motivation et de la poursuite des buts. Néanmoins, la pensée attributionnelle a été peu explorée lorsque de nombreuses causes sont impliquées par la transition vers un nouveau contexte d’accomplissement. Notre étude examine, dans le cadre de la théorie attributionnelle de Weiner (1972, 1985, 1995, 2006), une telle pensée attributionnelle complexe lors de la transition du lycée à l’université, c’est-à-dire lors du passage d’un environnement d’apprentissage familier à un nouvel environnement d’apprentissage. Au début de l’année universitaire, les étudiants ont évalué la mesure dans laquelle six attributions consensuelles contribuaient à la faible performance, ce qui a permis de mesurer leur importance relative. Un pattern spécifique d’attributions, identiques à travers cinq cohortes d’étudiants de première année, a été identifiée comme contribuant à la faible performance (respectivement effort, difficulté des épreuves, stratégie, qualité des enseignants, capacité et chance). Une analyse en clusters a indiqué que les étudiants différaient dans la combinaison de ces attributions, ce qui suggère un plus ou moins grand contrôle sur la faible performance. Ces différences clusters attributionnels étaient liés aux cognitions et affects au Temps 1 (Octobre), et avec les résultats universitaires et le GPA au Temps 2 (Mars). Ces différences dans la pensée attributionnelle complexe sont discutées en rapport avec les changements de contextes d’accomplissement.

The Effect of Attributional Retraining on Mastery and Performance Motivation Among First-Year College Students

Motivation can be undermined among first-year college students as they face a multitude of unanticipated challenges during the transition from high school to college (Compas, Wagner, Slavin, & Vannatta, 1986; Perry, Hall, & Ruthig, 2005). As a consequence, approximately 27% of first-year students do not return for the second year of college (Feldman, 2005). First-year college students (N = 336) participated in a study to examine the efficacy of an Attributional Retraining (AR) treatment designed to increase motivation and enhance academic achievement. Employing a pre–post study design spanning an academic year, we examined the impact of AR on student motivation as operationalized in terms of mastery and performance goals. Findings indicated that AR increased mastery motivation but did not affect performance motivation. Findings also demonstrated that mastery motivation mediated the relationship between AR and grade point average, suggesting that mastery motivation is a key mechanism of AR. Findings are discussed in terms of conceptual contributions to both the AR and achievement motivation literatures, and practical implications are outlined.