The author argues that despite the conventional wisdom that schools cannot overcome the effects of socioeconomic status and race on academic achievement, there is a growing body of literature indicating that school climate and students' sense of control of their environment are strongly correlated with achievement. Five school-specific strategies…

Measures of beliefs and reading performance were collected from 350 Moroccan students over a 5-year period beginning with grade 1 and 464 students over a 3-year period beginning with grade 5. Belief measures covered metacognition of reading skills and strategies, causal attributions, and conceptions of the good reader. (TJH)

A study investigated college students' (n=226) academic help-seeking behavior under task-involved and ego-involved classroom conditions, students' attributions for failure, and two types of help source (instrumental, in which the student finds his own solution, and executive, in which a solution is disclosed). Implications for classroom teaching…

The impact of learning mathematics under successful and unsuccessful cooperative group conditions was studied for 181 seventh graders in Montreal (Quebec) who had a learned-helplessness or mastery-oriented attributional style and different prior mathematics achievement. Learning of helpless and less able students may depend on accomplishments and…

Examines path-analytic models linking measures of self-concept, attributions, and grades of 194 Filipino high school students. Finds attributions for successful outcomes to ability or effort mediated the causal relationship between achievement and self-esteem. Interprets negative paths from ability attributions for success in mathematics to…

We analyzed the role that psychosocial empowerment and social support factors play in the employment status of immigrants who participate in job-readiness programs financed by the European Social Funds and the Welfare Services of Andalusia, a region in the south of Spain. The goal of these programs is to find new ways to improve immigrants'…

The authors sought to assess the perception of risks for coronary heart disease (CHD) in college men and women. They surveyed 470 undergraduates from 2 major 4-year institutions who completed a questionnaire that measured perceived risks for heart disease. Sixty-eight percent of the respondents rated their risks as lower or much lower than those…

In general, studies investigating sex differences in mathematics performance have empirically analyzed students' responses from standardized tests. This paper reports a study to extend the investigation of sex differences related to mathematics performance by examining cognitive and motivational factors as well as standardized test scores. Boys…

This study examined the relationship of ethnicity, gender, socioeconomic status (SES), age, and self-perceived academic achievement to students' academic motivational orientations. Groups of 333 American students in Wisconsin and 375 Chinese students in Hong Kong in grades 8, 10, and 12 completed questionnaires that gathered demographic…

The effectiveness of providing a specific kind of motivational feedback was investigated in a computer-based instruction (CBI) environment for different kinds of students and different levels of instructional control. Feedback was intended to affect students' temporal perceptions of the causes of learning successes and failures, their attributions…

If teachers can be trained to attribute poor student performance to such things as insufficient instruction, low expenditure of effort, or poor strategy rather than students' lack of ability, they will modify instruction or provide a new learning strategy. For this to happen, teachers must first display attributional thinking about their own life…

This report examines the relationship between attributions that explain the present by examining past behaviors and those that examine current behaviors to predict and control future behaviors. A fundamental difference is proposed between students who are high versus low in academic need achievement. The high achievement student is described as…

This research explored cognitive-motivational patterns of learning-disabled and nondisabled adolescents by employing the theoretical model of C. S. Dweck, which posits that a "learning goal" orients students toward the development of competence, whereas a "performance goal" orients students toward the documentation of competence, and that these…

Victims of father-daughter incest may develop a number of social and emotional problems which motivate them to seek mental health services. A study was conducted to (1) investigate the patterns of father-daughter incest responsibility attribution by clinicians working within mental health facilities and (2) explore clinicians' tendency to report…

The purpose of this study was to examine the potential impact of maternal attributions and self-attributions on the academic achievement of father-absent children in comparison to commonly identified family interaction and demographic variables. Subjects included 33 male and 34 female father-absent sixth graders (mean age of 11.6 years) and their…