Results of a questionnaire completed by 985 secondary school students in England (180 Asian females), indicate that Asian females enjoy school as much as or more than their counterparts, and enjoy subjects along sex stereotypical lines regardless of ethnicity. Grouping students by ethnicity for studies of motivation is questioned. (SLD)

Associations among children's beliefs about intelligence and effort, goal orientations, self-reported learning strategies, and academic achievement were studied with 319 children in grades 3 through 6. Results revealed a coherent set of beliefs about intelligence and academic performance, and that beliefs are powerful predictors of achievement…

Conducted two studies to evaluate the efficacy of attributional retraining as a career-counseling technique for college students. Results reveal that participants who received attributional retraining exhibited significant changes in career beliefs and attributional style, and engaged in significantly more career exploration behavior than the…

Participants (85 women and 30 men) responded to measures pertaining to careers. Findings reveal that a larger proportion of women than men perceived past barriers as associated with family-related issues. Results also reveal a significant negative relationship between perceived occupational barriers and career maturity for some individuals.…

Three experiments explored the conditions under which inductive inferences about people were made by children and adults. Results indicated that children often predicted that people would behave differently in the future than they did in the past. Younger children limited predictions of consistency to non-psychological events. Older children…

Relationships among locus of control, academic program, and sex of 267 ninth-graders were studied. As hypothesized, students in the advanced level program were more internally controlled than were general or basic level students. Although locus of control was related to academic level, its relationship to gender was not consistent. (SLD)

A research review of ability and effort studies in the United States and Japan finds: (1) effort considered the primary determinant of achievement in Japan; (2) different concepts; and (3) the Japanese fostering task involvement through cooperation. Social structure may account for the attributional patterns of Japanese children. (SLD)

Beckman's rating scale for antecedents of alcohol use was administered to 212 high school freshmen and juniors, including equal numbers of American Indians and Euroamericans. Compared to other adolescents, American Indian males felt that heredity and fate played a greater role and their environment played a lesser role in their use of alcohol. (KS)

Two studies explored preschool, second-, and fifth-grade children's moral and dispositional judgments as influenced by an actor's efforts. Findings indicated that older children's judgments and predictions reflected coordination of the actor's effort with information about the actor's anticipated goal. Preschool children focused more on the…

Critical incident methodology was used to study the attributional beliefs of 211 junior high school students in 4 subject areas. Results highlight the context-specific nature of causal beliefs and their linkages to reported classroom achievement. External attributions were more likely to generalize across subject areas. (SLD)

Three studies examined observers' attributions and reactions to negative emotional displays, as well as expressers' expectations about others' reactions. Analysis revealed that people attribute others' negative emotions equally to situational factors and dispositions, whereas their own emotions are attributed to the situation more than to…

Beliefs about causes of success in school and sports were related in a logical fashion to personal goals for 207 high school students. Satisfaction and boredom in the classroom were primarily predicted by personal goal orientations. In sports, satisfaction and boredom were more intimately linked to perceptions of ability. (SLD)

Five matched groups of 15 children (ages 8-13) were compared to determine whether behavioral subgroups of children with learning disabilities (LD) form different beliefs regarding causes of their achievement-related successes and failures. The achievement attributions of subjects were heterogeneous and related to presence and type of behavior…

This study, with 87 underachieving and 77 achieving gifted students in grades 6-9, found that general locus of control measures did not differentiate between the 2 groups, that both scored significantly higher on positive internal than on negative internal locus of control, and that there were no gender or grade effects. (Author/DB)

Interviews with 148 African-American fifth- and sixth-grade students (in either gifted, above average, or average academic programs) found that gifted students, regardless of gender, were most supportive of the U.S. achievement ideology, and average students were least supportive. Discrepancies between beliefs about hard work and success and…