Success and Failure in Junior High School: A Critical Incident Approach to Understanding Students’ Attributional Beliefs

Attribution theory, which focuses on students’ beliefs about why they succeed or fail, has served as the interpretative framework for numerous studies of student motivation. Yet, the relevance of this research to educational practice has been questioned because most studies focus on college students’ reactions to hypothetical scenarios or contrived laboratory tasks. To address this problem, we employed a critical incident methodology in which junior high school students recalled naturally occurring successes and failures in four subject areas (English, math, general music, and physical education) and rated the relevance of eight causal attributions in explaining each outcome. We explored the effects of situational context (subject area, activity) on attributional beliefs, the relations between attributional beliefs and reported grades, and the dimensionality of attributional beliefs. Our results highlighted the context-specific nature of causal beliefs and their strong linkages to reported classroom achievement. Our factor analyses of attributional ratings did not yield dimensions of locus, stability, and controllability but instead showed a systematic trend for external attributions to generalize across subject areas and for internal attributions to remain subject-area specific. We discuss implications for teachers and researchers.