Attributional retraining (AR) is a motivational intervention that consistently produces improved performance by encouraging controllable failure attributions. Research suggests that cognitively engaging AR methods are ideal for high-elaborating students, whereas affect-oriented techniques are better for low-elaborating students. College students'…

Background/Context: In the last several decades, a college education, in particular the bachelor's degree, has become the key to higher earnings, and overall, to a middle-class lifestyle in the United States. In an increasingly globalized economy, privileging information and communication technologies, it is more than likely that this emphasis on…

Purpose: To assess the extent of bypass for inpatient care among patients living in Critical Access Hospital (CAH) service areas, and to determine factors associated with bypass, the reasons for bypass, and what CAHs can do to retain patients locally. Methods: Six hundred and forty-seven subjects, aged 18 years and older, who had been admitted to…

In this review, we scope the role of interpersonal relationships in students' academic motivation, engagement, and achievement. We argue that achievement motivation theory, current issues, and educational practice can be conceptualized in relational terms. Influential theorizing, including attribution theory, expectancy-value theory, goal theory,…

Typically, attributions of attitude are assessed after one instance of an actor's behavior. To determine what types of attributions observers make after the presentation of a sequence of behaviors, 135 college students were asked to make attributions about an actor's behavior after having been provided with category-based (group membership) and…

Individuals tend to hold on to initial impressions even after the data upon which they have formed the impression have been discredited. To partially replicate and extend a previous study (Ross et al., 1977) on belief perserverance, in which subjects were told they were to act as clinical psychologists attempting to understand and predict…

Fifteen papers address issues in therapeutic recreation for disabled persons from the perspectives of practitioners, educators, and students. The following papers are presented. "Therapeutic Recreation Service: The Past and Challenging Present" (H. Sessoms); "Therapeutic Recreatiion in an Era of Limits: A Crisis...A Challenge... An Opportunity"…

In analyzing various moral and legal philosophies, two perspectives emerge, absolute moral rules/higher law, and situationally-specific moral rules/legal positivism. From these two perspectives, four types of individuals emerge in accordance with their degree of adherence to ideological tenets: (1) situationists (high on idealism and relativism);…

Individual differences in same-aged children's reasoning about effort and ability, as well as the consequences of different forms of reasoning in actual achievement situations, were investigated. It was hypothesized that different forms of children's reasoning would be related to different (helpless versus mastery-oriented) motivational patterns.…

S. Jackson and S. Jacobs's criticism of "single message" designs in communication research served as a framework for a study that examined the differences between various sequential request paradigms. The study sought to answer the following questions: (1) What were the most naturalistic request sequences assured to replicate…

These two documents address the issue of dealing with blame for farm families in crisis. The first document, for the adult student, discusses how and why people blame each other, with emphasis on the current farm financial crisis. It is noted that blaming occurs primarily at the anger and depression stages of the loss cycle and that, when losing…

This study targeted students with a history of academic failure to investigate the relationships among reported self-regulated learning strategies, attributional patterns, academic performance expectancies, and academic performance. Ninety-seven community college students, over 70% of whom were minority group members, completed self-report…

An examination of the dynamics of academic failure is presented in this monograph in the form of an annotated bibliography of current literature. The writings cited offer a cross-section of research on what factors affect students' choices of adaptive or maladaptive behavior patterns in the classroom and in relation to their peers. Section one of…

The content of attributional interpretations and their discrepancy from the attributinal styles of subjects were manipulated in order to investigate the importance of these variables to the effectiveness of interpretation. Thirty-nine subjects experiencing problematic negative emotions and exhibiting either characterological or external…

The purpose of this study was to determine if an intervention package designed to develop the administrative and managerial skills of women vocational educators would change their ascriptions to resemble those of male high achievers. The independent variable was a 2-week residential institute held in June 1982. The dependent variable was…