Two studies investigated treatments on the attribution and behavioral persistence of special education students (9 to 15 years old) labelled as helpless in arithmetic. In the first study (N=14), an attribution retraining treatment was effective in alleviating helplessness but not significantly more effective than a control treatment. In the second study (N=14), effects of three success-failure schedules (100% success, 76.9% success, and 46.2% success) on attributions and persistence were compared. Only the 76.9% success schedule increased attributions of failures to lack of effort and improved behavioral persistence in the face of failure. Results were interpreted as supporting B. Weiner's theory which suggests that an infrequently experienced event, i.e., failure, will be attributed to an unstable cause, i.e., lack of effort. (Author)