Children's attributions for success and failure: Effects of age and attentional focus.

Abstract

This study was an assessment of how children's achievement attributions were influenced by their age, attentional focus, gender, and success or failure experience. Older and younger elementary school children performed a memory task under either self-focusing or task-focusing instructions. After performance, half of the children in each condition were given success feedback and the other half failure feedback. Attributions for performance were then obtained. In the success condition, children judged effort to be the most important cause of their performance, whereas children in the failure condition attributed their performance mostly to the difficulty of the task and their inability to remember the story. Older children in the self-focus condition attributed success more to internal causes than did older children in the task-focus condition. Younger children attributed both success and failure more to luck than did older children. Few sex differences in attributions were obtained. Achievement attributions have significant consequences for subsequent achievement motivation and behavior; attributing success to one's ability and failure to lack of effort promotes positive achievement motivation and behavior, whereas attributing success to external factors such as task ease and failure to lack of ability has negative consequences (Weiner, 1979). Many researchers have assessed the development of children's attributions for achievement successes and failures (see Frieze, 1981, for a review). In general, these studies show that children under age 8 tend to confuse different causes such as ability and effort. By age 12 or 13, children's attributions seem quite similar to those of adults. Though we have learned much about general developmental changes in children's attributions, we know less about how different performance conditions influence children's attributions. One performance condition that has greatly interested so